Residential Project - Photo Montage

[noelyone]

Hello people,

I've been working on this montage and need some help! Basically to keep it simple - I need more realism in the model! At first glance you can see it is a computer generated visual but what can I do to improve this aspect? I've done a bit of photoshopping - clouds over the windows, retail on the ground floor but still something is not right.

Any useful pointers would be much appreciated! I've had great help in the past here so hopefully a few of you can throw in your two cents!

PS - I used sketchup to build the model.

Many Thanks,

Noel

[cotty]

Perhaps the people in the shadow of the building seem to be out of place because they are lit by the sun.
The shadows from the roof overhangs at the shop windows are not correct/too strong because the whole building front should be in the shadow (like neighbour building).

Cotty

[galinette]

Yes, lighting between picture and rendered parts is not coherent.

Also, adding a very slight blur and some noise to the rendered part would help. The CG part is too sharp and too "noise free" compared to the picture parts.

Etienne

[Bosseye]

Hard to do this kind of thing and make it seamless I find. You're off to a good start though definately.

The shadows don't look quite right to me - are they rendered as they look a little like you've photoshopped them on? You'll have to make sure they're orientated correctly with the surrounding buildings otherwise the whole thing will look out of place.

Change your brick texture slightly I think, the bricks look a little too small to me compared to the adjacent buildings.

And as above, blur the render a little so its not so crisp.

Is that reinhard tonemapping? Looks a little flat, perhaps change to a camera setting to bring out the contrast as the rendered bit looks tonally a bit flat to me.

Also the main 'Retail Store' is obviously a texture and a little out of alignment - can you update the model a little to detail this bit better, ie make it actually recess into the building as it would in real life.

The other alternative which I quite like, is to make it really obvious that this is a rendered visual. It can sometimes be a useful way of making it more stylish in that architectural way and sidesteps you having to try and blend it into a background. Also can help with losing the whole 'uncanny zone' thing where it just never looks quite comfortable in its surroundings. And if you're anything like me, the background photos you're given to work with have been taken by agents and are generally low res, poorly taken and not so great.

Heres one I did below a while back, essentially its about the canopy - if I tried to insert it into a photo of the area it just looked wrong, awful, cheap. So I went entirely the other way and made it more arty, more stylised - quickly modelled a chunk of the block then blended the render with the sketchup model to get the half and half result. Essentially I chucked realism out of the window for this one as it simply wasn;t going to be feasible. Client was happy with the results.

Edit - and before anyone says, I know theres no drivers in the cars forgot all about them. No one noticed though, heh.

[noelyone]

Hey guys, appreciate the feedback.....

Galinette/Cotty - good call on the shadows, lighting and the blurring of the proposed - this actually worked a treat and went some way in making the proposed building blend into the context a bit better.

Bosseye - cheers for taking the time! You're right, very difficult to make it seamless - on exporting the original 3D model it looked very realistic, it actually came out better than I had hoped. But then inserting it into the montage I found it wasn't all that realistic in relation to the context of the photo... I'm not sure what more I could have done. The model itself was built well and the textures applied were to a high standard (as for the bricks, yep they're a bit narrow but that's what the client needed) so perhaps using sketchup with indigo has its limits.... maybe with the current addition you cannot get ultra realistic effects....

Nice visual by the way - interesting way of dealing with the 'realism' issue!

Noel

[Bosseye]

Hey guys, appreciate the feedback.....

Galinette/Cotty - good call on the shadows, lighting and the blurring of the proposed - this actually worked a treat and went some way in making the proposed building blend into the context a bit better.

Bosseye - cheers for taking the time! You're right, very difficult to make it seamless - on exporting the original 3D model it looked very realistic, it actually came out better than I had hoped. But then inserting it into the montage I found it wasn't all that realistic in relation to the context of the photo... I'm not sure what more I could have done. The model itself was built well and the textures applied were to a high standard (as for the bricks, yep they're a bit narrow but that's what the client needed) so perhaps using sketchup with indigo has its limits.... maybe with the current addition you cannot get ultra realistic effects....

Nice visual by the way - interesting way of dealing with the 'realism' issue!

Noel

Post your latest image so we can see

Man, everyone is so down on poor old sketchup! Uber realism is certainly possible with sketchup and Indigo, but the devil is in the detail - to be fair, that will be the same whatever package you model with, if textures or model is off in any way, you'll notice. We're wired to notice things that look incorrect so an odd bit of shadow here, a poor texture there, it'll spring out of the scene.

I've mentioned it above, but if massive realism is your holy grail here then you need to look at the Retail Store texture/model section at ground level - the perspective of the texture is off and it looks flat, detracting from the image, especially if you're trying to seamlessly and realistically composite your render into an existing photo.