Architectural Visualization - feedback appreciated

[MJM1987]

Hello, since being unemployed sucks i thought i could spend some time learning skindigo.

I allready played around with some of the models i made during my study (engineering/architecture) in sketchup. Please feel free to bash my work and tell me what i can do to improve.

Some questions i have regarding the following renders:
1) Is it possible to use a dirt map to make some areas of repeating textures slightly darker/lighter to prevent repetition?
2) Can you add an alpha map to a volume? (to give planks some thickness)
3) Is it possible to add dust in the barn? (to accentuate the light beams)
4) How the hell does Jeff makes those incredible glowy athmospheric sky's in his farnsworth scene, it really makes scene come to life. My scenes look a bit bland.

Render times: about 1 hour per model.
System: core2duo E8400, 4GB DDR2 , ATI HD4870 and 32-bit OS

Any feedback is greatly appreciated,

[Pibuz]

Hi MJM! First of all sorry for you unemployment, it is a rough period and I think you're doing the right thing, choosing to upgrade your skills in other topics. I think this will help you in the future.

Btw, let's talk about your renders.

The first one is very simple, not so realistic because it lacks a proper environment, but it's a good start anyway! The only thing I could suggest you is the use of exit portals (if you didn't use them already) to make the calculation faster: position the exit portals on your openings (be careful: have them facing inside!). The counterpart is that they will cut out all the geometry behind them, so use them keeping this in mind. I guess your "light beams" question concerned this render: in skindigo it's very simple to achieve that. You simply have to play with the SketchUp fog settings and you're done. Set a slight grey tone for the fog, and adjust the near and far sliders a little. Remember that since you're actually using a SSS material you will have a longer time of calculation. The fog feature is very sensible, so a little fog in sketchup will result in a strong fog in Indigo, so play with small values. I don't remeber which one, but I remember that either the "near" or the "far" slider has to be kept to 100%, make some tests to see what works better (..I believe that it was the far slider that had to be kept to 100%). One last thing on this render: I see your wooden beams and pillars' edges are perfectly sharp: to increase real-likeness you may want to weld them, or at least the closer ones.

Your second render is a good start but it can be improved for sure. First thing, I must say that I find exterior render way too difficult than indoor shots: the scene must be more complex to be plausible, and in sketchup it's so difficult to find good models that fit well for outdoor images. We should be able to handle a much higher number of polys in order to have the possibility to add shrubs, and trees and bushes and hedges and all the other organic stuff you can think. While google works to make this possible (I hope) we have to work with models imported from other softwares, which sketchup still handles not without difficulties. I suggest you take a look at the xfrog site, which some time ago gave the possibility to download free plants (130 free plant to be honest). You have then to donwload the objimporter from the fluidray renderer site (the importer is totally free) to import the models into sketchup keeping maps and UVs. I also suggest you use bigger textures to avoid the tiling: it's possible to make dirt maps and apply them to some surfaces, obviously, but it's some advanced mapping method, which will freak you out if you're not experienced
Also, displace could help giving your roof a better aspect.

Hope I helped a little. Post more tests, we're curious!

[MJM1987]

Thanks for the advice Pibuz!

Unfortunatly i had problem with my data hard drive, either due to some malware or driver problem. I fixed it so i could retrieve the data, though all of my jpeg files got corrupted headers. So i have lost my texture library, alpha maps and renders. Thank god i still have my models.
It will take some time to upload new renders since i have to rebuild texture library and retexture some models.

[neo0.]

I would say that a little more contrast on your second render would go a long way. You can increase contrast by switching over to camera tone mapping.

[MJM1987]

Been busy for some time messing about with blender and trying to find a job.
Have made some more models and renders though, this time i've been playing around with water, which is really hard to pull off.
For some reason i get the multicolored thingy whenever i have MLT or bi-dir MLT selected. Altough from reading several topics regarding water from coolcolJ (obviously) MLT is the best option when you want to produce caustics.

[Headroom]

Yes, real water takes a lot of time to render to remove the noise.

Look for some more info in this thread:

http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... t=caustics

In essence if you use PT-MLT instead of BI-MLT then the noise becomes monochromatic and less distracting.

Nice models/renders.

[CoolColJ]

The multi-coloured stuff is due to the dispersion, cauchyB
It will even out with more rendering time

if you set cauchy B to zero that won't show

You'll need to render it out to at least 3000+ samples per pixel