patrick anderson (siliconbauhaus)

[peterguthrie]

Hi Patrick,

Of the 2, I preferred your exterior as I thought you chose an interesting and unusual view of the building. Perhaps you could have put something in the lower right on the beach, as the eye tends to wander over there. I felt the interior was less successful composition wise. It maybe tried to get too much in, as it is quite wide angle and neither properly landscape nor portrait. As you have lots of fun and nice touches lower down, I thought maybe you could crop the top portion off and make it a wider aspect ratio like your exterior.

Overall, I felt both images were a bit dark. I would prefer to see the white walls in the interior being brighter and less yellow, and on the exterior there is lots of nice detail being lost in gloomy shadows. For example, it took me a while to realize the stuff at the bottom was sand. The water coming in at the bottom right is a nice touch, maybe there should have been a bit more of it?

Would you be horribly offended if I uploaded quick photoshop jobs I did on your images? I think they might describe better what I mean.

As Bertrand said, technically there is not much to criticize, my thoughts are just photography related as I think your hard work can have a bigger impact with a few tweaks.

Peter

[annkos]

Thanks Patrick! Now i can give mou more constructive critism! Generally in competitions its not all about pure technique but your subject needs a story or something with big impact to the other peoples, wow factor + technique + something really different form the others is the key in my opinion. Now lets talk about your renders!

Exterior:

Your exterior placed in nice place but looks like Wip to me. You need to work your materials like the tiles in the wall etc that reminds me interior space rather than exterior. Try to play with more fancy materials!! Your render settings are low and the post process had some problems like the blur in your image.

Interior:

Interior is my favourite! The first thing that i dont like is the background, the quality is low, here it is a tip, check images from google more than 20mp and then resize in photoshop to your size..other that the design is good but the couches have big distance between them and the table is pure for such great space, try to see interior photos for reference. Your floor is very nice!!

The lighting in both images is pretty nice and give good mood but of course you can do more with ies etc.. I hope i help you!! If you need more just let me know!

[danieljhatton]

the background, the quality is low, here it is a tip, check images from google more than 20mp

I think he used a 'Peter' so I can't see any quality problems in the Background.

Critique as requested. In terms of Ideas and Designs there is only a few things I could critique. Everything else was spot on. The Tile treatment you gave the exterior needed lining up and needed fitting better. The interior is my favourite of the 2. I love the toys. The floor idea is a great idea, but it feels like a stop frame in an animation, this could allow the viewer to feel they need more. The images are quite contrasty. Are you using 2.2 Gamma? The 'whites' of the images are off white. This might be a setting thing.

My personal preference is minimal. The more objects you have, the harder it is to create a real situation, imho, the margin for 'non realism' decreases and the margin for 'realism' increases (or is it the other way?), I'm not saying this is a bad thing just harder to get right. I try to get realism through lighting, textures, and situation. Objects are a personal preference so you are going to create a higher percentage of opinion leaning either way. I like to allow the viewer to see the space and decide on that later, for themselves. A lot of Architects take their project Photo's in an 'empty' situation. John Pawson, Takao Shioysuka Atelier and Akira Sakamoto, again, this is my personal preference. Not everyone's. And this can't apply to everything either. Classical, Hotels etc... I just lean more that way.

Overall I think the images are very good and only needs a couple of hours spent on Technical adjustments in the renderer, lighting colour, camera, deleting the odd item.

Is it Mental Ray? I find mental ray is great for a really punchy look but is hard to get a real Global Illumination feel from it. MR to me is more of a design orientated renderer, products or advertising, rather than a photography aligned tool. Another tip. I don't know if everyone does this but, I create all my work and tests for materials in a daylight situation. If you get it right there, transition to evening is more accurate.

Loving the work. Hope I helped!

[annkos]

I think he used a 'Peter' so I can't see any quality problems in the Background.

Please see my example to understand what i mean (for quality not mood).


http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/6...undexample.jpg

[siliconbauhaus]

Peter

Thanks for your comments, it's most appriciated.

The beach part was something I was struglling with and I agree with the wandering off part. I had a real problem coming up with a pov for both the interior and exterior as I was trying to keep the views unique and everytime I'd settle on a view I'd see other people posting images using the same.

I left my finals renders too late and ended up finishing them with about an hour left to post. I had very little time (and skills) to tweak them in photoshop so they're not far from being straight out of the box.

The whole gamma thing is another story. I understand all about lwf and 2.2. I run lcd monitors so the 2.2 thing seems moot to me so I use 1.8. I think my monotors need calibrating as the images certainly seems darker once they've been saved as jpgs in photoshop.

Feel free to photoshop away.

[danieljhatton]

Please see my example to understand what i mean (for quality not mood).


http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/6...undexample.jpg

I stand corrected. : )

[siliconbauhaus]

Annkos

Thanks for your comments.

This was the first time I'd ever tried a competition and while I do a lot of 3d work most of it is modelling for other people. I don't do renderings that often unfortunately. I couldn't crank up the settings too much as I left it way to late to run the renders (note to self to run finals earlier) and I wanted to at least be able to submit.

This was a great learning experience and it reminded me just how much I don't really know about materials and lighting and especially post work. Hopefully I'll be able to learn and improve for the next competition I enter.

[siliconbauhaus]

Daniel

Looking back on it now I should have modelled the tiles but I didn't want to take the time to do so. I tried to keep the placement looking as correct as possible. I use 1.8 as my gamma setting and I think my screens are out of wack.

I was orignally going to be minimal with the interior but I felt it should have some sort of "life" to it. It was difficult picking a pov for the interior as it feels so narrow when you look towards the kitchen and so I compromised it. I wasn't sure if the toys would be readable in the final render and I did the warhol for a laugh.

I use mental ray but I think I only used final gather on the interior. I should have turned on gi. This was a learning expereince for me as I've not done much with night time images. I had it set up where I was getting white walls but thought it was too white so I messed with my whitepoint. I probably should have left it alone.

I really wish I would have had the time and skills to tweak the images in post but I didn't.

[peterguthrie]

I happened to use magic bullet photolooks for photoshop as it's my new toy, but essentially I just boosted the midtones in the exterior and tried to brighten up the white walls in the interior (hard to do this in post though, i think re-rendering the interior would give a better non burnt out result)

[siliconbauhaus]

Peter

Thanks for having a go with it mate. If you want to play with the actual render file let me know I'll I'll post it.

[bakbek]

Hey Patrick, It seems you got some great feedback so far!

I wouldn't add to much about the technical side and focus on the exterior image you made. I hope you don't mind my scribbling all over it



Here i go...

The composition you have chosen for this image was very tight. The house occupied the entire frame with almost no space around it. Removing the trees could have helped with that (1)

Setting the stairs (3) the way you did so you end up at the frames edge is not so good, which brings me to the main focus of your image... Peter suggested more focus on the water line to the right which can be great! but not with stairs like that. The main thing is to allow for more story in your image, so that we can understand and relate to the house design more.

I opted to show a focus to the left, and possible lake / sea view that will be at that place (2) this will open up the image and will allow us to appreciate the house more in context. If you wanted to focus on the right, then i will change the stairs ans perhaps showed a lounge area, were the middle tree is, overlooking the beach and water.

the sand / wall line (4) could have used more treatment of dirt / rocks / plants.

Glitch in the light? (5)

The big blue light on the right wall (6) wasn't a good choice taking into account the blue sky... it seems as if the wall was deleted, rather then been accented by a light. I marked other places were i think hidden lights would have been very nice accenting the "caverns and cracks" of the design as opposed to the frontal light on the facade and spots a the bottom.

I hope this helps you in some way... It's my personal take on your image.

[siliconbauhaus]

Ronen,

I appreciate your comments and your mark up. I think I had too many ideas going through my head and not enough tiime to implement them. I orginally had the stairs over on the right but the empty space on the left was troubling me so I moved the stairs.

I certainly agree that the shot was tight, mainly becasue I didn't want to have to spend a lot of time creating a shoreline. While I can bang out a house in no time, landscaping is a different matter.

At the end of the day it was my fault for no allowing enough time for post work and the images suffered from it.

Looking forward to the next one.