Architectural Visualisation

Had a chance to do some modeling on the couches and chairs. I've then taken the models into zbrush and added stitching, ripples and folds for some displacement. I've attached a render(before displacement) and a zbrush preview. The preview and material are not the final render, but rather a real-time preview to see if I was headed in the right direction.

The images are too small to show the stitching and the lighting is not good enough to show the true details. I will have more preview renders in the next few days that will better show off the progress.

EDIT: Added two three more quick ZBrush renders that better show off some of the details.

Had a chance to do a tiny bit more modeling: the fireplace and a few odds and ends. I also started to set up the lighting. It's pretty slow to render for the time being, about 30-40 minutes on my quad-core pc, but it uses physical sky and sun, 9 portal lights with big area shadows, photon global illumination(3mil), final gathering, and 3+ million triangles. It's only gonna get slower as I add materials and more models, but I'll tune it for final rendering. I'd like to get it to 1-2 hours per frame on my quad-core pc at 2k res.

Edit: Second render had the AA kicked up to 1 2 .05 and still has aliasing issues. Took forever for the 1k render too. Like 3-4x as long!!! Gotta do some serious tuning.

I got a chance to do a little more work on this scene today. I've started to add some place holder models so that I can get a feel for how everything will fit together. The dining room set, the couches and chairs, dishes, etc. will get refined later once I've decided I like their general shape and position. I'm going to start in on the lighting tonight if I get the chance. The idea is that I'll get the basic scene(s) working and then I'll refine everything from there. I find that if I spend too much time on one spot that I can potentially lose focus on the project as a whole and also potentially burn-out. By doing it this way and adding revision upon revision, I hope to keep my motivation up, simply because I can clearly see it coming together. If this were a group project the tasks would be divided up and I'd work a little differently, but as a one man show I find it best to do it this way.

You can see renders of the speakers here.

I actually started this nearly a year ago, but I'd like to see it finished. This is the project as I left it. Sorry for the poor image quality, most of these are straight viewport captures scaled down.

As you can see there is a lot of detail in the models, with a total of roughly 1.5 million triangles - a considerable amount of geometry is off screen though. This is probably too much detail for a real life project with tight deadlines, but it's been great as a personal challenge.