To pair with the launch of my portfolio site, and in response to some positive interest from viewers, I am going to post up a few screen caps & details that show the process/pipeline of building one of my most recent architectural visualizations. This image was completed for Snohetta for a design competition they entered last year. You can seem the other images generated for the affair on their site. You can also see more on the competition here or here or here. Vincent Appel, from Of Possible Architectures, assisted with the modelling process while I did the bulk of the post-production in photoshop as show below. I am actually going to breeze over the details, if you don’t mind too much. I will address additional techniques later on in different posts.

1 Compositional Render: This was the first pass at this image. Very rough, no rendered textures as you might notice, and very early in the design stage. This was modeled in Rhino and rendered quickly in Vray. The focus was on the composition of the image, as well as the lighting. It also gave me a head start for collecting resources & background imagry, as well as brainstorming color palettes.

2 Texture Render Tests and Color: One of the big strengths of this image is its utilization of 3d textures. Anyone seriously interested in rendering very HQ believable images needs to start exploring these & how to use them effectively. (You can find tons freely available online). We did a lot of tests and we found that using 3d wood grains really took this image to the next level. If we were to just montage wood textures, we would not be able to get the depth of color & tone & believability without a lot of extra time & painting. My biggest piece of advice is to be selective–don’t go crazy & overtexture everything. Too much detail looks as fake as too little. Also note, that my particular style is towards something more painterly and atmospheric, rather than strict realism. At this stage I also was working on color overlays–still far from perfected here.

3 Final Base Render : As you can see, the base render is very simple. White surfacing for most assets and the texture is preserved in this. The wood was rendered in color because it was easier to modify from there. What you don’t see is that we also rendered out several channels. You should always include the RENDER ID channel, as well as light/shadow. Play around though. I used a variety of channels to achieve different affects & gain control over different elements.

4 Initial Color Manipulation and Background : First set of color overlays. I prefer to start a little oversaturated and reduce as I move on. The background was pieced together form a series of photographs and ended up being quite a headache to get in perfect perspective.

5 Color Manipulation, Saturation : Increased saturation; this was actually a test/experiment that I quickly did on the side. Oversaturating sometimes allows you to see what colors are actually acting in certain areas. Note heavy purple on left. That was annoying me a lot.

5 Desaturation, color, people, snow, etc : Snow added, colors desaturated somewhat, carousel added in the background as well as people.

5 Season change! : JK Client decided daytime better for selling. Probably right but I still liked the snow. Grass was painted in rough.

5 Final Touches! : Softened the images by removing/reducing black. Also softened background and increased lighting.