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.

Fun stuff. This is a great example of finding the sweet spot of complexity and technical challenge, and blending it with the budget and timeline that the client has. We could have put 400% more time and budget into it, and gotten decent results, but the client wouldn’t have been able to afford it, and we would have had 100% less revenue from the project.

That being said, here is this nice little interior fly-through.

IHOPU Animation Proof02 from Ryan Tow on Vimeo.

Here’s some recent work. This is what I’d call a “bread and butter” rendering – knocked out in about twelve hours total, including some revisions with the client. Still chasing the right sky and grass tones. Had some grass I liked better, but the client asked for greener grass.

Another lesson on this one – dark browns are very, very tough to dial in.