Recent Work

[Whaat]

C&C Welcome.

I'm looking for all ways to improve but especially in post-pro. I'm a noob at photoshop.

Thanks,

[Zom-B]

some nice houses you made there
Regarding enhancements for this scenes I would suppose to work on Light & Materials mostly!

Regarding the light your scenes lack in hard shadows you see for sunny exterior photos.
Maybe start with a nice exterior HDRI image and fake a sun by positioning a small meshlight
in the direction from the sun,by this you can tweak the hard shadows the way you like.
Scale the mesh Disk up to soften shadow edges if you desire to.

Regarding textures the most of yours are quite... well... boring and lifeless.
Try to use Phong materials most of the time with lower IOR and Exponent and also use always a Exponent Map!
Even for uniform house walls use a photo based albedo Texture tinted to your target color and generate Bump + Exponent Maps for it.
Try to Displace your roof tiles, they look quite flat, also here Phong would do some magic.
For wood you just use plane brown material, try a photo reference instead and tint it.

Also the bridge needs some photo reference texture and not just such a plane color...

[Frutiger]

Your grass looks really great! I'd love to hear how you modeled that.

I'd have to agree, your textures are a little flat. I'd took the easy route and bought some arroway textures. Expensive, but it makes all my work sparkle.

One trick in post processing I use is the "reduce noise filter". It looks really subtle in the preview, so make sure you view them fullscreen. It makes printed renders for presentations look fantastic!

Using photoshop go Filter --->Noise--->Reduce Noise and mess around from there. It takes the harsh edges off of a render, but keeps many of the details. It works especially well on plants, I've found. Here's some examples.

Here's the shot before I ran the filter. It's also useful if your image isn't totally resolved.

Pre-Filter

And here's the image post filter.

Post-Filter

You can see, you lose some detail, but it gets a very soft, warm feeling to it. Hard edges on models get softened up and colors blend a little bit. It makes the image more inviting and it's super easy to do. No selections or brushing or anything, just slap that filter on for instant friendliness.

Here's another example of the same scene.

Real soft.

And another.

Softened up.

Most of those images were still somewhat unresolved before I stopped them.

Here's one of your images before and after.

Before.

Before

After.

After

The only settings on the filter I use are strength. You can mess around with sharpen details, but the others don't really do anything for me.

Also, if you got some strong shadows in your render before you filter it, it makes it look even better when you denoise it. Enjoy!

[Whaat]

Thanks guys! The stucco on the houses is actually based on acrylic stucco which is a common material where I live. I was actually quite happy with the material. It includes both an exponent and bump map.

Some of the detail was lost to downsample the images and convert them to JPG for uploading to the forums. Here are two 100% PNG crops.

The grass was added in post. I agree that the texturing can be improved. I'm just starting to learn PS so I hope to be improving my textures in the future. I find that great textures seem to separate a good render from a great render.

[CTZn]

Take the ISL way whaat, it's definitly worth it. The way I'm seeing it no surface should be flat no more, noise will have an excuse because each surface will be vibrant.

Now I understand galinette when he pops and says "hey, you want me to do this [ISL stucco] for you ?" You can do it.

Good that you showed some details, and that you are improving your texture skills, because those you didn't do are detracting to the image the most.

[Headroom]

I hope my question does not derail this thread, however, I have experimented once for a specific project with Galinette's carbon fiber texture.

My experience was that it rendered quite a bit slower than an image based texture.

So the question is what is the performance penalty when using ISL textures ?


BTW, another good tool for removing noise is NeatImage http://www.neatimage.com. Can be had as a plugin for PS and other image editing software that's less expensive e.g. Aperture.

[CTZn]

There will always be a penalty for using ISL over textures, from negligeable to important depending on the shader complexity. As to why to use ISL, I would underline the "infinite" resolution of shaders in details and extent.

It's an esthetical choice if one can afford the overhead. Ok, I'm a fan

[StompinTom]

Hey Whaat, neat stuff there. The two things I'd mention would be the flatness of the lighting and the context.

Your house images lack contrast and depth, mostly due to the very uniform and flat lighting, which doesn't make them look appealing at all, and at first glance I thought they were flat-shaded renderings with Photoshopped grass and plants.

I'd suggest using the Sun/Sky system with an emitting plane behind the camera to still catch those reflections of clouds and such. It's difficult to tell what time of day it is or what the weather is like, which is quite important to put the viewer into the mood of the piece.

On the subject of reflections, I think some more context/surroundings would help the scenes out. Something like the shadow of a tree falling across part of the house, or reflections of trees and the houses across the street could help it out. Right now it looks as if you modeled the houses and then just stuck some stuff around them to fill up the frame. While this can work sometimes, developing the yard and street a bit more could also help you find new views that you may not have realized before.

Altogether good stuff! Love the stucco material, the grass (very realistic!) and the bridge

EDIT: Just got to thinking: arch. viz isn't about replicating reality. You're trying to project an idealized set of circumstances and conditions, presenting the project in its best light. A lot of the time that means stretching the limits of so-called reality, which is the fun and creative part. If you look at some good arch. photography, you'll see photos that look completely fake or unreal in the sense that they look 'too' good to be true.

[Whaat]

Hey Whaat, neat stuff there. The two things I'd mention would be the flatness of the lighting and the context.

Your house images lack contrast and depth, mostly due to the very uniform and flat lighting, which doesn't make them look appealing at all, and at first glance I thought they were flat-shaded renderings with Photoshopped grass and plants.

I'd suggest using the Sun/Sky system with an emitting plane behind the camera to still catch those reflections of clouds and such. It's difficult to tell what time of day it is or what the weather is like, which is quite important to put the viewer into the mood of the piece.

Interesting comments Tom....I tend to find that using the Sun/Sky system always detracts a lot from the realism of the image. All of the house renders are lit with environment maps. I was happy with finding an EXR that could produce a sun shadow but not make it too harsh. Maybe I should have added more contrast in PS but I didn't want to lose the details of the house.

I definitely heed your advice, though. Your work is what I aspire to. Thanks!

[Zom-B]

... My experience was that it rendered quite a bit slower than an image based texture...

Just to clarify this:
Until Indigo 2.4.8 only the 32bit version had a LLVM compilation enhancement that ended up with faster rendering then the 64bit version. But Now the Linux and Windows 64bit builds have it too and there shouldn't be any (relevant) slowdowns anymore related to ISL.

Code: Select all

* JIT compilation using LLVM of shaders is now enabled on Windows and Linux 64-bit

[StompinTom]

Interesting comments Tom....I tend to find that using the Sun/Sky system always detracts a lot from the realism of the image. All of the house renders are lit with environment maps. I was happy with finding an EXR that could produce a sun shadow but not make it too harsh.

Combining environment map with the Sun would be pretty neat, eh?

One thing you can try is raising the contrast of your EXR in Photoshop. Our old friend Bertrand Benoit wrote a little blurb on getting more contrasting lighting and shadows from environment maps: http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/2010/02 ... -lighting/

[Whaat]

Just doing a test with an improved stucco material for another house I'm working on. I think it's getting more realistic.

It should add some more depth to the wall material.

[ieatfish]

I agree that it is looking better. From the stucco I've seen, the 'globs' are more varied in size and how far they stick out. Then again, that might not even be important once you get the other textures to be more realistic, that succo might not need any changes.

[CTZn]

Hi Whaat, I feel guilty: after I teased you into doing a procedural stucco I did one myself, it's uploaded as roughcast_1. There is a common scale into each parameter that you can change and the two albedo triplets can be tweaked also.

It is suitable for closeups but the displacement can be discarded or lowres, that's why its bump is so strong. I hope I didn't pull the rug under your feet in doing so !

[Whaat]

Hi Whaat, I feel guilty: after I teased you into doing a procedural stucco I did one myself, it's uploaded as roughcast_1. There is a common scale into each parameter that you can change and the two albedo triplets can be tweaked also.

It is suitable for closeups but the displacement can be discarded or lowres, that's why its bump is so strong. I hope I didn't pull the rug under your feet in doing so !

No worries, friend! I wish I had more time to mess around with shaders. I like the work you've been doing lately. Keep it up!