Making of Minoco Wharf

• Share
• Tweet
• 
  

• Share
• Tweet
• 
  

Lukasz Gradzki from renderare breaks down the process of creating one of the images for the Minoco Wharf project they were involved in making visuals for. What I like the most about their process on this one, is how simple the basic model could be… and how they use textures instead of modeling and lights. I do find it funny how a SketchUP model is the “base” for further AutoCAD modeling… It seems almost sacrilege to me (more about the tools we use in an upcoming post).

Author: renderare

renderare studio makes illustrators of unbuilt spaces and architectural designs. It was co-founded in 2007 by Lukasz Gradzki & Kamila Gradzka, after working together in HKR Architects in Dublin.

Introduction

I’ll start by showing one of the final results first, so you’ll know what we are aiming for with the process described below.

The entire brief was just one page of simple sketches and a very basic SketchUP block model of the site, to give us an idea about the massing and approximate viewpoints required.

We had very short time-frame to turn 5 views around so it was necessary to cut as many corners as possible especially when it came to modeling.

This is how the SketchUP model looked like…

Basic Modeling

The 3d model of the site was built in AutoCAD (Yes… AutoCAD). After importing the SketchUP massing we used it as a template to build the basic geometry.

All buildings had to be shown during different times of the day and there was no time to illuminate them with real light fixtures, and this is without even considering the increase in render times that it would cause… so we’ve put surfaces set back slightly under the glazing to use them as self illuminating objects later.

They were split into 4 layers to allow some variation… Surfaces for inner glaze skin of the buildings

All slabs don’t have thickness i.e. they are just flat regions.

Slab edges are represented by polylines. We are going to turn them to renderable splines in 3ds max and assign different material than the off white slabs.

Outer glazing is modeled again just as polylines, also to have renderable splines modifier applied to them. They are divided into five layers as we will be assigning five different patterns.

Just to show the offset distance between inner and outer glass.

Here is the camera viewport with some entourage from 3d libraries was added in 3ds max.

Instead of importing the DWG, it is linked to the scene to allow rapid changes and updates. Here you can see the inner glazing surfaces.

The slabs.

Slab edge as renderable splines.

Internal lights surfaces (inner glazing turned off).

Textures

We used textures to act as the lights inside the buildings in this scene. This is the texture for self luminance of the towers.

And a different texture for the glow in the ground floor areas.

This brings us to the complete linked model with the outer skin as renderable splines of various sizes and appropriate textures for opacity applied.

We used five different opacity patterns for outer glazing.

And a bump map for glazing to give an impression of some window divisions…

Final Images Post Process

We render an ID mask for quick selections.

This is what came out straight from V-Ray.

Replaced the sky in the background.

Reflection of the sky in glazing, ground floor activity and a bit of lens blur in the foreground.

Color balance and contrast corrections.

Final image with cutout people and vignette added.

A similar approach was used for the other images in this set we made.

I hope you find this useful in your own work, seeing that relatively simple modeling, without too much detail can still turn out very good when there is not much time and with smart use of textures to compensate for missing model bits and lights.

Cheers,

Lukasz Gradzki.

Subscribe to the Blog

Choose one or more of the options below to get updates about spotlights like this as they are made available.

For more information about this blog, go ahead and visit the About Page.

• Email Newsletter - Periodic updates plus more :-)
• Twitter - Updates about the blog and other things too.
• Facebook Fan Page - It's new and cool if you like Facebook.
• Google+ - Follow my post streams on Google+.
• RSS - Get updates as posts get publish.

---