Recent Finished Work – Rowhouse Concept
Our office was tasked with developing a look and feel for a new resort development in Branson, Missouri. The client said they wanted a “Mary Poppins Streetscape” – the building was adapted from a photo they provided of a buiding in Celebration, Florida. This is the finished image – probably one of my favorites I’ve created in quite a while.
To totally go 3D-nerd, I thought I’d share some challenges and interesting things associated with this scene. First of all, I tried with all my might to use displacement mapping for the cut stone on the first floor of the building, but mostly, it just crashed and made me angry. I broke down and modeled the stone, and it looked five times as good and rendered in half the time.
Several years ago, we picked up a great package of 3D trees and shrubs from Xfrog – they’re really nice models, but they’re also really hard on a scene at render time, especially with any kind of indirect illumination calculation (in this case, Mental Ray’s Finalgather). Thanks to some tips I picked up from one of Jeff Patton’s master classes from Autodesk U a couple years back on exposure and lighting, I figured out that I could actually get large numbers of trees rendered out if I ran a Finalgather pre-pass with a flat-grey material prior to running the final color pass. Granted, it isn’t as physically accurate, but I decided that I’d rather have actually RENDER than to have nothing at all. Here’s what that pre-pass looks like:
So, by the time I got all the 3D vegetation in along with the building, I had 29 MILLION polygons in the scene, which just a stupidly large amount. Every scene and computer has a limit of what you can render in one shot, and I found it on this one. Next time, I’ll be breaking it down into passes – I had to do some of that in the end to get it out and done.
So – fun image. Nice to have something that isn’t all parking lot and has some perspective/vanishing point action happening. This was a fun project to step back and really examine my workflow. While my workflow isn’t perfect yet, it’s getting better and more methodical.