Tomorrow Challenge

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I wanted to take a part of this competition and create a stunning image! But I had only 2 days to make it from the beginning to the end and therefore I’m not quite satisfied with the final result.
I spent almost 1,5 day on modelling the whole building and the surroundings and another 7-8 hours on making materials, lighting and postproduction.

I wanted to make a winter mood scene with slightly blueish ambient light and very smooth yellow tint from interior. It was my first “winter” project so I have to learn a lot of new things. I also wanted to try a different camera angle – instead of “Rule of Third”, “Golden Spiral” etc. I decided to put the building into the center and use 18mm Focal Length.

There is a lot of things that I would like to do in the other way, only if I had more time – there is a lot of repetition 
in the snow, the “snow poles” around the whole area are the same, also the lighting of the scene is far from being perfect, the water material is very simple without any foam, and many others small and more obvious mistakes
and errors – but I’m done. I’ve done what I could and I want to submit this project as finished.

Cheers!

Tomorrow Night

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I was inspired by the Grieghallen tutorial by Tamas Medve (featured a long time ago on the blog) to try my hand at making his wet stone pavers before the competition was ever announced.

When the competition started, I figured it would be a good opportunity to both add to my portfolio while also testing the pavers in a full scene.

My computer at home is quite old and as such it really can’t handle large expansive scenes, or scenes with a lot of assets or accessories so I had to be clever about chosing my camera angle. Luckily I found a reference photo of the building online which I used as my inspiration. The angle is suitably dramatic and also limits the amount of background scenery I would have to build, allowing me to focus on the lighting and materials and not worry about my computer dying!

The scene itself is fairly straightforward spline modeling for the most part. The pavers out the front are a simple texture with a custom displacement as in Tamas’ tutorial – with a plane of water put on top to simulate the puddles. The background (and the reflection in the windows) are free building models downloaded from 3dsky.org and most of the textures came from my own personal library, Arroway or Textures.com. The background trees are a simple forestpack with some zDepth applied in post production. I made extensive use of the Corona Light Mix as it allowed me to leave my computer render the scene out once (as it took forever on my old machine) and then tweak the lighting afterwards to get it looking how I wanted. I don’t think I would have had the time otherwise to adjust the lighting in the short amount of time I spent on the project (overall I think it was 3 days after work).

1931

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A really cool thing about archviz is that you can take a photograph of impossible things.

Something I like very much is to look at old photos of places and buildings I come across daily and realize how a different context can have such an impact on the same object. I want to do a little trick here and it is to translate the building not only to a different place, but to a different era. And of course, as much is I love it, this era could not be other than the 1930’s. As if the restaurant and museum were built at the same time.