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NYC + VRay Evaluation
On Monday we went up to New York (up is relative to Philly...I guess?) to visit our sites and the UN. Our first site visit was Lincoln Center. I will probably choose that site since I am attempting to bring the truths of genetic research to the public, so i can some how create a "science performance space" maybe? The other option is a site on Wall Street, and I thought Lincoln Center just seems more appropriate for my project.
After that we went to the UN and got a tour. Very interesting. I'm not going to describe it in detail, but it was neat to see all the spaces that we hear about and have a real place to see when given the descriptions. Also interesting because North Korea had tested the nuke the same day.
We then went to Tina's office for a lecture about architecture and power. It was a cool office. One of those deals where 5 or 6 firms rent the building. So it seemed like a lot of energy, nice mixing pot kind of place. More life than a big sterile firm. You know, books all over, samples coming out of the wood work, models of totally different styles on shelves. On the way we stopped by Winka Dubbeldam's Greenwich St. apartments. Of couse we were unable to go inside, but I found the scale, in real life to be much nicer than in photos. In magazines, they always blow stuff out with the 20mm lens etc. I thought the actual proportions were much nicer. It's smaller than I imagined. Plus we saw it from the street, not a helicopter or something like most architectural photos like to show buildings. Which brings me to a current interest of mine in architectural representation. People go nuts about photorealism (sometimes), but no one likes to render with natural field of views and from where people actually see the building. I'd like to see more renderings from 5 feet up and at 50mm. Sure they are usually less exciting, but a fisheye from the moon is not the perspective most people ever see. It also makes designers keep it rizeal. No trickery. Such as the translucent robolofted shell typology. That said, I like LTL's wacked out perspective drawings A LOT. haha.
I've been tooling around with VRay trying to get ready for reviews (sure 2.5 months away, but I don't want to be struggling at 4 am on December 9th), portfolio reworks(fitting it in to random downtime) and a visual studies bit I will give this week. I have been quite happy thus far and this it will be a great tool.
Exhibit A
These two images are of a project I worked on while at Takenaka. It was more of a schematic proposal, but I'm just trying to pull some stuff together for my portfolio because they are planning to use a variation of the design. It's a twenty unit apartment complex in Ashiya. I designed it as more of an east coast style townhouse community and they liked it. Here are some early renderings.
The next set of images are renderings of a pen that I made in Rhino last year just as modeling practice. The first image is from Rhino's built in Treefrog engine. After that is the same image, but from VRay. The red is a little bright and the ink goo is off, but it's getting there. Definately more realistic.
Next comes the best rendering I've ever gotten from Flamingo. This was the original rendering I got last year. It took about 45 minutes to render. Then comes the money shot. That is VRay using an HDRI environment. Of course if I used those quality settings for a building rendering it would take 9823498234 years, but it's amazing to see what VRay can really do. It took >4 minutes on my dual Opteron, 2GB system.
15 Comments
that last one really is great. I mean they are all fantastic, but that last one totally pops. well done.
damn. i want these tools.
agreed. that last one is money.
dang
VRay for Rhino is $250 student discount. It's pretty easy to use actually. Very nice.
vray is great... fast, and pretty simple compared to other rendering software...
nice pen....
so, any tips on how to start with vray? are you using vray for rhino?
Yeah, that is VRay for Rhino. Tips are to just practice. There are a ton of tutorials online. The site where you get VRay actually has some tutorials and you can down load the models and look at the materials and the lighting, and the render settings. I like to just make simple objects and test materials. Really simple scenes and try them. I also take old studio projects, set all the materials to putty grey and play from there. YOu can take what you know from other rendering packages and kind of dump it over and modify it to the new software. But again, there is a ton of documentation on the web. You can even use most of the MAX VRay tutorials for a place to start (it's a little different).
renders are nice, but babelfish wins best in show for me.
way too true. sad that people who should know better really do write/talk like that.
That is pretty freakin' cool ...
ALRIGHT! I'm on the front page of archinect with my terrorist visa Photo!!!!
lol. yes. i saw that pre-coffee this morning when i first turned on my computer. i was startled.
Hey there fellow philadelphian hasselhoff.. i am just up kelly drive from you... anyway i have heard the buzz with on vray. and enjoy work in rhino... are you using vray through penn or on your own? evaluation copy? i want to learn a rendering program without the cumbersome program of ViZ. the renderings look great!!
I purchased VRay. You can install on multiple PCs as long as only one is using it at a time. I admit there are things I like better about the Viz/Max interface, but not exporting etc is beautiful. YOu can get an evaluation copy from the asgvis website. It water marks all of your images, but it sold me.
Good point about the orientation of renderings. The computer makes it far too easy to look at a design from the birds perspective. While that's fun and all, it doesn't show how people will interact with the building. In college I was taught that presentation drawings should be from the perspective of the user. Typically that's a sidewalk view at about 5.5 feet high.
hmmm where do i get vray for rhino educational?
im having problems with finding out who to contact.
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