Arch Viz Reel
 

Well after a few ideas that turned out to be far too complex or time consuming or just flat out wrong, I have finally gathered some proper advice on what to do for an Arch Viz reel.

This WIP thread is going to be a proper one in my eyes, from conecpt images, schedules and scene images as things progress up until the final composition and Finished thread. Comments, crits and suggestions would be greatly appreciated and that is partly why I intend to give you guys as much info about how I am doing things as possible.

Back to the basics: we finally got an instructor that has some good knowledge and after speaking to him about my previous failures he advised that I do 3 scenes: an interior, an exterior, and a flythrough.
Now I could do the interior, and the exterior and then do a flythrough of them together however this was ill-advised as if I can do three separate scenes/themes I would be able to show more well rounded skills and artistic flair which is more appealing to employers obviously. So I've taken the idea, drawn out a rough estimated schedule seen here.

A big thing that was suggested is to build everything up proportionally. Especially for arch viz, as at say the half-way point I would have all three scenes atleast roughed out, with some texture and probably some light in them. This way you have progress to show at all levels and you won't find yourself saying "well I have this scene fully complete, but I didn't get around to the other two".

For each scene I have rough sketches and rough dimensions for each scene. I also have a massive amount of reference photos and material so I should be able to keep focused which is a good thing:P

Onto the goods.
Interior Scene - A Modern Kitchen

Exterior Scene - A Backyard Pool

The Flythrough - Condo Unit (Interior/Exterior)

Sorry for the pictures, as I had to capture them with my camera. I don't have a scanner at the moment.

As for progress shots, well I have started roughing out the interior and am going to keep working well through the next 2 and a bit months.
So here goes:
Interior rough in:http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...or/rough01.png
Interior rough wire:http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...ior/wire01.jpg

Thanks for checkin it out, and there is more to come!

Cheers,
Alexander

Its looking good so far, only crit is that bar flap thing is looking a little too thin and lacks support, a decent sized thanksgiving turkey would probably snap that right off lol :p

Still working on building the interior scene, added an ambient occlusion for the test render, so far things are looking pretty good.
The back splash tiles took a while to do but I love the look and irregularity they add.
Also added some supports to the island bar and put it up on stilts to match the height/depth of the cabinets on the wall.

Above the cabinets are windows in case anyone is wondering.http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...or/rough02.png
Also another wire with a closeup of the tiles for those curios folk.
http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...ior/wire02.jpg

One quick update before bed.
All the structure is done as far as I can tell unless I decide I really want the change something.
As such I have started to build some furniture which you will be able to see from the render, also some tweaks to the range hood and the cabinets have seen a few minor adjustments. I went through about 3 different chair design/builds before I came up with a stool that I liked and that fit what I envision to be the final look. So that is a plus, other than a late wakeup this morning and being mothersday and all I didn't accomplish much else. So back to work bright and early in the morning. There should be either a lot more modeling updates or some texture/light updates tomorrow. We'll see how things are going at school.

Anyways, the occlusion render as promised:
http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...or/rough03.png

Goodnight and a happy mothers day to any on the forum who are moms.

Cheers,
Alexander

done some more research today and spent a bunch of time on the stove top and no the island. A lot of tweaks, and building the faucet took a lot of time. Got it all rigged up too. I'll upload the images when I get home!

http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...or/rough04.png

http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...or/rough05.png

http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...or/rough06.png
To the right of the faucet is the handle... it has since been fixed so the next update should reflect that change incase anyone cares to criticize that :P
http://www.ahosking.com/3DAnimation/...or/rough07.png

And if anyone else is wondering, the faucet is rigged so it moves and is as flexible as it should be, if one cares for a playblast of it I could arrange one.

Everything looks good but I'm not sure about the shape of the faucet. The water would have to have a huge amont of pressure to get through the entire faucet and I'm not sure if could get out but I'm not so sure about that though. I live in America where everything looks the same.

thanks for the comment anthony. What's funny about that faucet is I didn't think it could work either, and then I saw one. It wasn't in anyones house but it was a working demo at one of them "modern' (aka expensive) stores around here. That's where I got the idea for it. Along with some dilligent googling.

I think its a nice way to break up the hard edges anyways. We'll see how things start to look.
The lighting/texturing is being a little difficult at the moment, but when some headway is made progress will be posted.

Well the lighting/rendering is coming along, very slowly, but surely. Trying to incorporate compositing too in post. So a fairly significant learning curve on render layers, and lighting/texturing for compositing.

Anyways. more progress to follow, eventually.

As I'm extremely tired today, the lighting/rendering was putting me to sleep and focus was not happening. So I thought I'd start blocking out the other two parts of my demo. Well at least the exterior scene so far. Should get to the fly through in a few minutes.

I was up all last night trying to get my computer working properly again. Stupid Vista kept slowing down and slowing down. So I upgraded to XP 64Bit. And well I love it. No more resource hogging for my OS.

Been busy on the demo, lack of updates is well pretty lame I know. But when your focused it is hard to put it down to post some progress. Anyways, was learning about render layers/compositing. And well I had to do a test so there is that to see atleast. Been working on a lot of roughing out my scenes, reference gathering and modeling of furniture and such. So lots is on the go but nothing is polished yet.

Anyways, basic shaders added into this just to bring the composition to life. But the beauty of render passes is how easily those colours can be changed, removed, or w/e!
I love it.

The Video!

Enjoy, and let me know what you think. Lots of work left to be done on it still, but you might pick out something I neglected to remember.

As for the blue on the stool legs, the bottom is from where they were going through the floor and when rendered out in layers well you see them on top of the floor now. That has been fixed in my file and that issue should not be apparent again and I think I will re-render that layer tonight.


Cheers
Alexander

A Quick update on the situation quoted from my post at Deviantart.com

"I think I may never truly be happy with my personal portfolio designs however, in light of a recent phone call and upcoming interview I was asked for the url of my online portfolio.... thank god I had one in the mix. I ended up busting my ass this evening to get a clean and somewhat functional version of it up. While I know the graphics need work, it is fairly simplistic which I enjoy and frankly, seeing it in its working and realized version I am a lot happier with it. It took getting past some brain farts to do it but here is version .05.

Hooray for student work. The interview/meeting is at a company called Zero Fractal . Hopefully everything goes well.

Comments and crits are always cool on the piece and if you'd like to see it in action please visit aHosking.com

Thanks!"

Well everyone, looks like I'm headed back into the 3D Studio Max world as required by my industry of choice. I had an interview this week and it was confirmed that I need to get back to using Max for one main ingredient: vRay. And well I hear it is out for Maya now, or is coming soon I still need to know how to use Max.

Anyways, I should hang around the forums as I still have some useful maya KNowledge and I'm gonna keep screwin around with it as it never hurts to know more than one piece of software.