EricMBloggie

Here’s an easy way to use Google Maps, Photoshop, and 3D Studio Max to generate a pretty good site plan for architectural visualization.

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Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make something look cool in 3D.  Wide-angle fisheye lens, shallow depth of field, V-Ray sun and sky, and some Greeble’d planes.  Instant awesome.

This is a test render for a ‘Water Feature’ that’ll show up in a building somewhere. I did this with 3D Studio Max and V-Ray. The basic technique: The water is a high resolution (200×200) plane with a Noise modifier on it, scaled so the noise is stretched vertically. The gizmo is animated downwards at a constant speed, and there’s a glassy-watery shader on the plane. If you don’t know 3D, this sounds like gobbelty gook.

The tutorial presents a method to simplify the sampling / anti-aliasing settings in Mental Ray to the point that you can use the Spatial Contrast number to control the ‘Speed vs. Quality’ of your renders. It is most closely related to Christopher Nichols’ anti-aliasing method for V-Ray, “Speed vs Quality in V-Ray,” but was developed independently from that, using countless websites and hours of testing. If you’re also a V-Ray user, I suggest shelling out the seven bucks for Nichol’s tutorial.

This method mitigates the time spent rendering an image with smooth, anti-aliased lines.

UGLY (Fast render)

NOT UGLY (Slow render)

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Sometimes when using Archvision’s error-prone RPC plug-in for people, trees or cars, a scene will get clogged up, like the drain in Bigfoot’s apartment, and cease to render.

Rather than panic I choose to composite the RPC’s using either Photoshop for stills, or a variety of software for animation. At the architecture firm I work for right now, we use Premiere Pro to do our compositing.

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