architectural visualization
 

this is going to be an architectural thread concerning imported geometry from autoCAD, mental ray, HDRI, and FG. most important of all - the shaders. that´s what I kind of got stuck right now. if anybody got some cool architectural shaders for mental ray in maya or any presets - please let me know! I´m going to post some images when back at work.

ps: I found this thread on sm.

http://forum.simplymaya.com/showthre...e&pagenumber=1

very informative! too bad tho that all images where removed...

explanation on light setup:


I used a hdri-image to light the scene but disabled primary visibility cause I need a dynamic background. therefor I mapped a procedural shader to the camera´s environment tab - used an envSky_node. under it´s Cloud Attributes tab I mapped a 3dcloudTexture. it´s placement_node´s Translate attribute is keyframed from 0 - 1 on x-axis over the whole scene - so the clouds are moving slightly. in the envSky_node the elevationAttr is animated as well from -20 to bout 70, so I get a anim from dawn till dusk. this is my background image for the scene. reflections tho come from the HDRI cause the envSky is just a imageplane and doesn´t enlight the scene. It could when pluging the output color to the cameras backgroundColorAttr, but that doesn´t give a good lighting.

in addition I placed a directional light with the same angle as the inital elevation direction, grouped the light to itself and connected the elevationAttr into the lightGroup´s X-rotation. so the directLight moves with the sun from the envSky shader and I get an additional light casting raytraced shadows which seem to come directly from the procedural background image.

well, so much for initial light setup. next big thing will be the shaders which give me the creeps allready.

I got some weird reflections on my windows. they are shaded with DGS. the opposite of side of the building is empty, so there supposed to be sky reflections only in the windows. from this angle the building is reflecting itself in the right part of the render. but in the left part its all white - no sky. also when rendered from the front I got the whole reflection consisting of this kind of bright color.

maybe cause I use the envSky for reflection? checked it in the imagePlane - "visible in reflection/refraction"


what happened?

ok problem solved so far. I had stuffed the imagePlane into 2 cameras (checked Looking through camera). as long as the 2nd camera was visible the image plane showed up twice. disconnecting didn´t help, so I had to delete the 2nd camera completely.

the envSky´s "Visible in Reflection" attribute - this might also be a bug. well the texture is kind of visible but only the summary of the sky shaders RGB levels. so I got a slightly more bright bluetone in all reflections. this might be cause I connected the envSky´s outcolor into the camera´s backgroundColor to get a dynamic global light for FG driven by envSky_elevation instead of the HDRI file. but there´s no other way than connecting those attrs.

now I have to get my true texture reflections!