Architectural Case-Study

[Michael Betke]

I started working on a case-study I have in mind for over a year now. Its a simple house with large window fronts, modern interiour (loft style) and I hope to be able to push teh limits a bit further here.

 

Masterplan is to release it as a stand-alone and show clients a good interactive walk-through.

 

Attached is a first preview for scale some furniture (grey) and a first lightmap bake. There is still a lot light bleeding at the edges although I use a 4096px map.

 

More to come!

 

 

[Michael Betke]

Okay here we go with some new stuff. Still doing basic things like furniture. Modified the building a bit and added more rooms like some kind of gym and a large bath.

 

Also played more with lightmaps and how to set up the maps in combination with materials. Really missing a material editor here...All in all its coming along nice. Custom cubemaps for some areas and so on.

 

 

Okay here we go with some new stuff. Still doing basic things like furniture. Modified the building a bit and added more rooms like some kind of gym and a large bath.

 

Also played more with lightmaps and how to set up the maps in combination with materials. Really missing a material editor here...All in all its coming along nice. Custom cubemaps for some areas and so on.

 

[Benton]

How did you do the cubemaps?

[shadmar]

Wow those look very realistic! Nice work

[Athos]

Interesting... which renderer are you using to bake the lighting?

 

Just for curiosity... how many textures do you have so far?

[Michael Betke]

Benton:

I hired one of the nice coders here from teh forums (Aily) and we worked out a "reflection-node" solution with a complete custom material system. Basically I can place a little sphere, press a key and it renders me a cubemap at this position which get saved. I then can edit it or just use it for a certain place. This way I could place one over the table and use the cubemap for this area only.

Reflections are important in arch-viz but also costy for the system. So this solution is a good way. Of course the material system allows me to blur the map, change strenght of the relfection and much more.

 

Athos:

I render it with Mentalray. But every other renderer supporting texture baking will do too. Flatiron plugin is used for laying out the sheets.

At the moment I have five lightmaps or so. Maybe I will batch them together later. Problem is that I need a new material for every object sharing same textures but different lightmaps. Its a bit tedious to set up. I could do it the lazy way and put all objects on one large lightmap but the resolution would suffer...so a bit learning how to do it best with the available tools.

 

EDIT: Also a small problem, normalmaps dont appear nice on a lightmapped room. Thinking about this too. Maybe a very slight point light or so without shadows.

[Michael Betke]

I had some time to work in the interiour some more which I think is finished now beside some plants and maybe decorations. Material need to be tweaked too. I wil ltry to bake a different lightmap for the main-walls too.

 

 

I don't want to forget about the outside area and will see what I can do there.

 

[Benton]

The books on the ground need to cast a shadow so it grounds them.

[Michael Betke]

Yes I fixed it. In the shots AO has been disabled until I changed the shader a bit so its more subtle.

Also started on teh outside...now again a transparency problem with windows in front of other transparent objects...

[Michael Betke]

How can a client get his desired interactive walk-through plus state of the art CGI renderings and movies for his marketing without making him paying two times? As most of you know todays game-engines offer a good feature set but it's a long way to CGI quality. Especially if it comes to GI and interior design.

So I took a look and thought out a way to reduce this double costs with todays tools I have at hand.

 

 

I started with the real-time version and used MentalRay for baking lightmaps. The only way to get good (static) light distribution in real-time. Since I offer a stand-alone application I just can do some levels (to keep this gaming term) with different light conditions.

I worked out some technical key elements like not making all the models to lowpoly.

Then Octane entered the game.

 

 

I converted all my standard materials with the nice Converter in 3dsmax and after 20min of fast tweaking I got a good looking realistic scene.

Now I could tweak it further, add some more stuff and so on.

 

All in all I was really happy with the result and a large advantage is the good rendertime for the "hybrid" setup.

 

 

Below are a few images and a YouTube link with a movie I recorded straight from my Leadwerks Stand-Alone and the custom features I have in there.

 

[smashthewindow]

The reflections on the table are just amazing.

[Gandi]

definitely needs more of the rabbits!

[Michael Betke]

haha.

[Saoru71]

you're a master! It feels so nice to see someone who achieves such level of control in the tools he uses. Great octane renders, sweet realtime rendering in LE. Congrats!