Architectural Visualization Study - The Farnsworth House

[Jeff]

Wonderful!
Could you tell us something about your grass; are they instances? And which material did you use for it?

Thank you very much, very inspiring work!

Thanks a lot zeitmeister! The grass are instances. A flat Circle is used as a 'dummy' (proxy) for the grass patch while working. For the grass material, I used the dull plastic material preset with the opacity being set at 50% inside SketchUp.

[Jeff]

I also did some post processing using Motiva Real Camera and Picassa photo editor.

[Pibuz]

Hi Jeff! Very interesting and inspiring subjet!
The architecture is great itself, and your aim for realism is a theme I've been always fond of.
The model from Peter is a very good base, and we architects know how important is to have a good modeling base to get nice visualizations.
I love your exterior mats: they're simple and white and new, so I believe that's something to make your life easier without having to place dirt and stuff around , but it is also a way to bring this building back to the initial stages of a just-finished construction, and that is an interesting point indeed. Your vegetation is stunning as always, even though it's visible that SketchUp just "blocks you" in some way: it cannot support the realism you want to achieve with your organic models. That is something I harshly criticize of our beloved modeler. I hope sometime a sort of organic tool will be added, and some sort of advanced UV-control tool as well.

I really like your search of particular light conditions. I LOVE the images in which you cannot see the sun, but the white architecture jumps out of the darker greenery; and most of all the ones you rendered with the stormy HDRI: they're wonderful. Especially the ones in which you have the lights turned off. They're your "best of" at the moment, in my opinion. I'd try to render them with some slight camera rotation, and adding some small details to the objects. They'd be really gourgeous. Keep testing AND POSTING!

[Jeff]

Hi Pibuz! Thanks a lot for the warm words. Very inspiring!

I hope sketchup would have those tools you mentioned someday and we no longer have to struggle making all those organic shapes. I am currently attempting to model some vegetation that resemble the ones on the reference images of the Farnsworth house. If these do not work, I might start importing some evermotion trees into sketchup.

Some more test renderings.

[zeitmeister]

Hey Jeff,

thank you very much for your answer... interesting grass patch model. It allows you to play with spare planted parts like walkways etc... nice idea; I didn't came up onto this by myself.

[Jeff]

I added more and bigger trees on the scene. I also tried adding a large tree I modeled in sketchup but it did not work.

[Jeff]

I decided to develop and work more on this scene after it got some very positive feedback from you guys.


Some notable changes on this update.
1. Increased the variety and number of trees on the scene.
2. Fixed the material on the leaves of the trees. All the leaves now are shiny and translucency was reduced.
3. The leaves obstructing the view on the upper right of the image are gone.
4. Increased the reflectivity of the grass material and removed the unusually large blade of grass on the earlier renders.
5. Introduced some tall grasses on the scene.

[Godzilla]

Great progress so far.. Some suggestions:

1.those floating stairs are really bothering me..
2. Perhaps you could place some more tall grass patches at the edges of the forest and scatter it (sparsely) in the open area?

Keep up the strong progress, this Is going to turn out great!

[Camox]

Great work, that looks really realistic. I love the architecture,i am looking forward to see more on it.

[zeitmeister]

This is outstanding!

I wonder how you did these heterogene colors with all your plants... all my renders always look far too much colored.
Do you desaturate your textures in general by 20% or something?
Great job and improvements!

[Pibuz]

Hi Jeff!
Glad you choosed this shot, it's one of my favourites

I like the long shadows you have in #17, and the warm lights inside the house. You have a little little little issue when turning sun off: you get a not-too-much-realistic black hole in the sky

I think the grass mat is a little too shiny now: can you share the grass settings btw? I'm very curious about it!

The trees are really good my friend. Not as detailed as if they were Max's but good enough to trick the eye

The colour contrast you have in 17H is very poetic: I always like tones like these.


Thank you for sharing! Keep going!

[Jeff]

Great progress so far.. Some suggestions:

1.those floating stairs are really bothering me..
2. Perhaps you could place some more tall grass patches at the edges of the forest and scatter it (sparsely) in the open area?

Keep up the strong progress, this Is going to turn out great!

Thanks a lot zilla! Before I was like planning to place something under the first tread of that stair but after looking at Peter Guthrie's render on flickr, i just decided to do the same. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pg/4029721 ... 626579436/ Placing more tall grasses at the edge of the forest would be a great way to make the environment look more natural. I would also like to scatter some dandelions on the lawn.

[Jeff]

Great work, that looks really realistic. I love the architecture,i am looking forward to see more on it.

Thanks Camox!

[Jeff]

This is outstanding!

I wonder how you did these heterogene colors with all your plants... all my renders always look far too much colored.
Do you desaturate your textures in general by 20% or something?
Great job and improvements!

Thanks zeitmeister! For the colors, the green was picked from a photo using the color picker tool inside sketchup and made some variants from it to be used for the other vegetation. It has the following RGB values shown below.

[Jeff]

Hi Jeff!
Glad you choosed this shot, it's one of my favourites

I like the long shadows you have in #17, and the warm lights inside the house. You have a little little little issue when turning sun off: you get a not-too-much-realistic black hole in the sky

I think the grass mat is a little too shiny now: can you share the grass settings btw? I'm very curious about it!

The trees are really good my friend. Not as detailed as if they were Max's but good enough to trick the eye

The colour contrast you have in 17H is very poetic: I always like tones like these.


Thank you for sharing! Keep going!

Thanks a lot Pibuz! I was planning to photochop that blackhole sun but just got lazy and just hoped nobody would notice it but you did!

For the grass, I used the shiny plastic material preset with opacity set to 50%. On the previous version of this render, I used the dull plastic mat. I will be uploading this grass soon.

For the trees, I did try importing some max trees I found on the net. But a 3mb .3ds file suddenly becomes 45mb when imported into SU and my computer freezes. This is the one item I'm still trying to fix.

Before light layers, scenes like 17H would be very challenging to make.