Carrara Challenge #20: A Room With A View - WIP Thread
Carrara Challenge #20: A Room With A View
"A Room With The View" refers to anything architectual from inside (window/s is/are preffered but not required): kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room, industrial space, theather, shopping mall, barn, airport terminal, photo studio, classroom, bank, restaurant etc.
It can be contemporary, cluttered, minimal, industrial, rustic, baroque, steam-punk and with or without characters (human/animal).
Basic Rules
- Each participant may submit up to 2 images into the Challenge.
- Images must be new (previously unpublished).
- Images must be primarily set up in Carrara.
- Images must be rendered in Carrara or in an external renderer for which there is a Carrara plug-in (e.g. LuxRenderer, Octane).
- At least one WIP (work in progress) image must be posted to the WIP thread (this can be as simple as the scene setup, a pre/post post-work comparison or just a final image with a brief description of the process you used or as complex as modeling rooms shots, shader setups or partial scene setups or test renders).
- At least one object in the scene has to be modeled in Carrara.
Sponsors
Once again, Daz will generously sponsor the monthly challenge with the following:
1st = $100 in Daz Original items
2nd = $50 in Daz Original items
3rd = $25 in Daz Original items
Honorable Mention = $10 in Daz Original items
Dates to Remember:
WIP Thread Opens: Wednesday Sept 16, 2015
Entry Thread Opens: Friday Oct 16, 2015
Entry Thread Closes/Voting Begins: Friday Oct 23, 2015 23:59:59 CST (GMT-6)
Voting Ends: Friday Oct 30, 2015 23:59:59 CST (GMT-6)
An announcement will bee made shortly in forum for The Commons. Ya all feel free to provide any updates or share there as well
Comments
This place reserved for further announcements
ah, I love a little Forster
Great, some archviz.
A nice opportunity to test the luxcore plugin :-)
The challenge being hosted by FifthElement, I have a immediate idea of a street view of a dystopian New York. Wonder why ? ;-)
That was an easy one.
I modelled the box with advanced box modelling skills in Carrara.
Or did I misunderstand something?
LOL!
Ooh - nice theme! I've been wanting to try some architectural renders for a while now and this is a great excuse. I think I am going to try and push myself and make something kind of Art Nouveau inspired. But first I'm going to practice on something a little cleaner and more modern. :)
Here's the start of my first entry. It's just roughly textured at the moment and needs some furniture, decoration and lighting work. I modeled the room (the woman is Predatron's Loretta LoRez figure, inserted for scale) in the vertex modeler and will be making the furnishings the same way. Can we add people forthe final entries, or is this supposed to be just architecture?
There is actually a thread on making simple buildings that might be helpful if we can track it down. There are about a half dozen different methods detailed in the thread. Here is one approach that I use based on what Roygee had posted in that thread.
- To create the walls. Insert a vertex object. Go to the top view. If you have a floorplan or other reference, use the global tab to load it in the top/bottom modeling view. Select the polyline tool. Place a vertex at the corners of the walls, of course. Also place a vertex point at the edge of any door or window openings, even if the window does not reach down to the floor. Continue around the outside of the entire floorplan until you reach the beginning point, and hit enter to close the polyline. Retur to the directors view. Select all and duplicate. Move the duplicate in the z axis to the bottom of any window. Duplicate and move the new line to he bottom or top of any window or door. Repeat for all window and door tops. Finally, duplicate and move vertically until you reach the ceiling. Then select all and use Constuct : Loft to create the walls. With a floorplan, snap to grid, and appropriatly scaled grid, you can ave an exact floorplan.
- To create doors and windows that will fit their frames in the walls. (start with a door) Select the polygons for the door. Use copy. Return to the Assemble room. Insert a new vertex object. Paste the copy of the door. Return to the walls. Delete the door polygons from the wall. Repeat for all doors and windows.
- 3D. Add thickness to the walls. Similarly, add thckness to the doors and windows. You can also add details to doors and windows, such as doorknobs, window frames/glass, etc.
- Adjust hot points of doors and windows so they can open and close properly.
- UV map, texture, etc.
I really need to work on the textures, but this room was relatively easy and quick to create.
Here is a thread that has several different options for creating buildings, walls, and other architecture in Carrara. It also has information on the architools plugin.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/593705/#Comment_593705
The basic concept for my first entry is coming together. I want a scene in which a cat is leading the good life inside one building while a dog is in a doghouse in the back yard. Not sure whether I want the perspective from the doghouse looking toward the house or from the house looking toward the doghouse. Will be experimenting with different ideas and approaches, especially for the glass shader for the rear doors. Needs lots of work.
I used the spline modeler to make each wall, floor, and roof of the dog house separately.
The dog is the millenium dog with the hound morph set to one. The texture is from the texture sets that come for the millenium pup.
The little girl is The Kids 4 with Jade morphs and textures. The cat is the millenium cat with the Carrara real fur sold here at Daz for the millenium cat, except I changed the fur shader by using a siamese texture map in the root and tip.
ahh the arch we had an exercise in arches
room with a view can see dinosaurs?
Maybe from the point of view of a nest? Or a fun Frazetta/Hoffman type scene inside a cave with primitive tribesman fighting off dino?
my ideas keep coming for looking in the room. >.< voyuer-ish
dino eggs!! thats what i want to model!!
or a baby crib.
or a pirate space ship bridge
they could be smuggling dino eggs. oh the havoc if those eggs hatch prematurely. dinos on a plane. they did it in a Dr Who episode, iirc - the dinosaurs, not the plane and eggs
Still making some changes to the structure of the room. Expect the shaders to change a lot more. Here is an update to the area around the fireplace. I've made a stone flooring area in front, with edge material holding down the squared off carpet. I've also added a protruding area for the chimney. I've seen houses with and without that. I'm undecided. But I will probably add an item of interest above the fireplace (maybe a painting) and I think it looks better when the chimney protrudes in the room a little bit. I've attached WIPs in which the internal side of the chimney is painted white and one in which it is brick. I'm undecided in part because I still don't know if I want paneling rising halfway up the room walls. Given the type of doors, I don't think so. Then I can start worrying about fireplace screens and tools, and other details.
The cat will be moved closer to the camera, reigning supreme on some plush furniture or pillow, something similar. And I need to adjust the glass of the doors so that the plight of the dog outside is more noticeable.
cats will reign lol
Sometimes it reigns cats AND dogs.
A suggestion on the glass would be to use a black color in the color channel if you have a color in there. Also, turn the reflection way down and the Shininess up to make it less diffuse, and also consider the exterior lighting. It is daylight outside, so it should be brighter outside than inside, even in a well lit room.
Here's some of the stuff I'm doing with my scene. I'm using one of the country cottage (or something) interiors, to which I've added a kitchen counter which I built from scratch with my own little hands. The UV is pretty rudimentary and kind of embarrassing so no screen caps for that! ;-)
I've also set up spot lights in two banks in the interior part of the scene to simulate GI. The lights spots are set at 1% brightness with the color set to be a cross between the floor color and the wall color. The half angle is very high at around 90 and the edge falloff is set at 20 or 25%. The range for the bank pointing more directly towards the window is set 20ft with a falloff of 20%,, and the bank pointing towards the side is set to 26ft with a falloff of 30%.
The flowers in the window each have a 30% intensity bulb light with a range of 3ft, and a falloff of 30% and a color to match the flower color parented to the flowers, and set to illuminate everything except the flowers.
The sunlight is actually three groups of two spotlights each. They all shine in at the same downward pitch. The center group points in straight towards the window, the right group points to the left to match the angle of the window's side bay wall, and the group on the left points to the right, and is aligned to match the window's right side's wall angle. The group of spots are set identically for brightness, but the main light is set to a yellowish color and a half angle of 85%, and the second light in the group is pointed exactly the same as the first light, except the color is slightly reddish and the half angle is set to 90%. All the lights are set at 100% brightness and all three groups use the same settings.
I took my screen shots last night so we'll see if they match up to what I've just written. ;-)
The lighting tweaks I made for the next test render were to change the range and falloff for the side bank of spotlights, and to better organize the sun-spots. I discovered that my left and right groups for the sun-spotlights only had the yellow light, so I duplicated that in each group and changed the duplicates to match the reddish light in the center group.
I think I may also exclude the flowers from the two side groups as the added lights are slowing the render buckets to a crawl when they hit the flowers. Probably because of the alpha maps and the translucency I added.
I did save a bucket load of render time by tweaking the toaster's shaders to get rid of reflections and just use Highlight and Shininess to get the metallic look I was after.
Here's the latest render.
By the way, the food is from Carrara's much maligned Native Content, with some minor shader tweaks to the cucumbers to add translucency. I didn't do anything shader-wise with the bread. There are plenty of sub-par models included with the Native Content, but there are also some nice little gems as well.
cucumbers do look good.
i forget about the translucency. it can make a big difference
Venkman- ' cats and dogs living together'
I'm not sure if I'm actually going to use this one as an entry - I had a much more interesting and dramatic idea while this was rendering, but thought I'd post the final pre-postwork version just in case the other thing doesn't work out. :)
I moved my ceiling up a little so the area in front of the fireplace was not so cramped and modeled a bunch more things: a rug with some dynamic hair on it, bookends, a table and some cushions, a wood floor, some baskets and some woven crates, light switches, electrical outlets, baseboards, picture frames and a vase. I also added some assorted knick-knacks from my library and a little more light.
In "A Room With The View" , you need a view. So there it is :
I used this free pack https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/architectural-exterior/cityscape/nyc-block-set-8 as a base to create this city.
It's rendered with luxcore with a fog. It requires far more sample to be of adequate quality, so i'll post a better view when done.
An other render with 400 samples and a heavier fog.
I'm not very satisfied of the result. Some more work to do...
Maybe try a clean render and add the fog in postwork?
5th element - his mother kept calling
I think I'm not that far from the result I'm aiming at. With Luxrender, volumes usully need plenty of samples. I've read in Luxrender forum that 10.000 samples was necessary for milk or orange juice :-).
Anyway, it's the background image and I have to work also on the foreground. I'll post the final settings if anyone is interested.