Thank you very much for organizing the challenge. It was a pleasure for me to take a part in it.

I have tried a few scenarios of presenting the building. First of all, the surrounding strongly reminded me of my one old alone walk in Bispebjerg, Copenhagen. It was a cold, hazy December night with snow slowly falling down and dimmed lights being cast out of the windows. Somehow it made a strong impression on me and I wanted to translate this feeling into my rendering here. Thus, I knew I want to stay faithful to the surrounding buildings that inspired me, as well as the school that was to be shown.

Basing on these initial guidelines, I put the scene in some testing. I noticed that the School of Architecture building looks much better from the distance than in the wide angle. That’s mostly due to the distortion of the curved facade in the closer perspectives as well as the absence of the most of the roof structure in them. Therefore, my decision regarding the camera placement was much easier. I had to exclude two viewpoints which seemed very interesting (ie. the one from the lower street with terrain stairs building some nice framing for the perspective and the one incorporating into its foreground the circular staircase on the square on the opposite side of the building) – they were too close and the building was too distorted in those angles. In the end, I chose the long shot that shows the entire building with the glimpses of its surroundings.

I tried some settings for the hazy night rendering (like in my initial impression) but they turned out to be distracting a viewer too much from the school building. Furthermore, I wanted to highlight the facade material and I needed some sunlight for it. Eventually, I ended up with some winter morning/noon mood. I had unwrapped the facade and painted the facades before doing all those aforementioned tests since I wanted its vivid hues to play the crucial role in the scene building.

Software used: 3ds max, V-ray, Photoshop

Architecture, an effort merely evolving the vicinity, inspiring the neighboring fabric, blending proudly into the environment, lastly seems to be the ultimate cause. What we do not look much into is the consequences triggered by the presence of a well-thought design. In our experiment, we have tried to re-imagine the street and neighborhood as the audience itself, witnessing a school of architecture, trying to build a conversation with the originality of material and form. Having now a purpose-built project in sight, how does the street respond to its presence? How does the sidewalk bleed into the limits of the dwelling. It’s an equation often solved by infusing a design into an abandoned land, how it improvises its periphery could be another venture altogether. Imaging the architecture itself struggling for enough applause, trying to fit in everywhere, craving just a little more warm welcome to start with.The primary aim was to mellow down the environment, that further elevates the footprint of the building, calming down the gesture of the street, making it accessible with many friendly vehicles, magnifying the inner world of an architecture school, that hardly stops functioning, even if it’s a rainy day without an umbrella. How the steel cladding rots under the dull sky, yet the quality of the core space is thoroughly projected through the windows, captivating the street to look inside. An architecture school that drafts all night long, for a moment looking into a calm street, that equally looks back inside!

-As the challenge says; “The image should be natural and realistic rather than over-stylized”.

-So I satarted to look out photos of the city of Stockholm, Sweden in a normal and natural ambient.

-I just loved the way the sun was there before the rain; Stockholm is a cold city and with some rainy days,
I just wanted to implant that story in my render.

-The first thing to do with the 3D model was modeling the specific details that wasn’t there,
like the lamps inside the building.

-Looking forward with the images. I put the sun in the same orientation.

-Making some test of illumination and just founding what I wanted to represent,
I started to place textures to the entire object that was on my scene.
I don’t wanted to make so a super realistic textures, just the important, and then in postproduction I would do the rest.

-Before I go on postproduction I like to make some drawings of where is going to be the people and
whats the story they are goingo to tell, and how it matches with the ambient.

-I just wanted to represent a normal day after rain, and then after a few hours the people enjoying the square now that the sun came out.