Exterior Archiviz - part deux (early evening)

Just as the title says.

Night scene.

Quick render. It is my first go at this kind of setup. I hope I did it right.

Post processed.

This one is adjusted to get the bluish tint that is usually found in photographed nocturnal scenes.

Settings. Click for higher resolution.

As promised last time out, here is the setup. This was lit by an LDR plugged into a skylight and instanced to the environment map. A few photometric lights to light the rest of the scene. The background sky is just a plane and was rendered in along with everything.

Smart IBL and Irradiance Particle

My irradiance particle "study-mode" is back in action! 

I have encountered a very cool site that provides high resolution hdr stuff long before I have gotten myself hooked on this Irradiance Particle thing and the whole image-based lighting gig. It's www.hdrlabs.com. It's where I get my hdri's but I never bothered with the Smart IBL GUI. 

To make the long story short, I got bumped in the head and  this idea of using Smart IBL's user interface to setup my scene just came to me. I import only the background and reflection because I want to control the lighting using irradiance particle as my lighting solution. It's fast and easy scene set up. Plus your hdri's get sorted. More info can be seen at their site. Great free stuff. I totally recommend it.

Click to enlarge

Irradiance Particle (update 3)

click to view image

Work has suddenly picked up again and this is the only update I have to offer for this particular scene since my last post. And one "extra-income" (some sketchup modeling stint) which I could never pass up also came along the past weeks. That's the reason why this got bogged down a little. It feels like forever to finish. I really hope to finish this like it should be. 

Here I added some grass using the grass-o-matic and plugin some trees using Onyx trees.

Shaderlight

Here is something new that I have been busy with. All this render-your-exterior-scene-in-unique-way thing has got me to look for alternative ways to make my exterior archiviz stand out. I am greatly pleased with the way ctrl ghost of mental ray renders image-based lighting.

But while in the process of "learning" irradiance particle in 3dsmax mental ray rendering for exterior archiviz, I have tumbled upon this new render engine for Sketchup. Enter Shaderlight "An interactive, photorealistic renderer for Google Sketchup." The software is in its beta stages but out of my curiosity I tried using it for my Crockett residence scene. 

Since I was into learning IBL (image based lighting the non-production shader way), using irradiance particle this simple and small but wonderful piece of render engine does the job in real time(!) using Sketchup's physical sun or HDRI's. You can change materials using Sketchup's default material editor and tweak them simultaneously using Shaderlight's material editor as your scene renders progressively. You can freely move the camera around and change views inside Sketchup and you can see it change instantly as it renders. Did I mention it can use HDRI's as light source?  And one thing I like the most is that there is no need to export your scene, it renders right inside Sketchup (well, sort of. Actually it opens a render frame window where you can take snapshot of the render as it progresses.)

I can ramble all day about how I love its simplicity. Head on out to http://www.artvps.com to have a look. I almost forgot to mention it also has something for 3dsmax. nice. :)

 This came out directly from Shaderlight without any post processing.

 Click on image for higher resolution.

Here is a test. It's a snapshot of render in progress. I have used one of the default lighting presets (golf course evening) which also comes as a background should you choose not to use a custom one. In this scene I changed to a custom background to suit my need. Forgive me on my grass material though. I was eager to try it out immediately. 

Cheerios!

irradiance particles and hdri. update 2

I have gone to a totally different direction with my exterior archiviz test.
From my regular lighting solution of using Daylight with mental ray sun and mr physical sky, I have taken a new path - Image Base Lighting using HDRI's through Irradiance Particles.

Click for higher resolution

A few more adjustments. Somehow, I would have to invest in some decent HDRI's. That would come if only I could land in a decent job that would pay me and this hobby. :)

Image Based Lighting

I've been scouring the net lately for tutorials on Image Based Lighting. There were several that I've found to be very helpful. Of course I have to try it out for myself. So I exported a model I did in Sketchup to 3ds format as a test subject. It's a simple wooden toy train. If you would take a closer look, the train's wheel are not smooth. I did not use turbosmooth modifier on it thinking it would come out okay but then again it didn't. This was probably because of the way the model got exported or the way I modeled it. Whatever the cause for that, I had to find out for my next time.

I love the way it lights up the entire scene and the soft shadows it creates.
More to come.