Dynamite Quay

Just a couple of images I produced to impress a potential (now actual) client. Would have loved to have had time to populate the interiors with loads of furniture, but as is often the way with these things there just wasn't the time. Maybe the client will want to produce some brochure images sometime to promote them to potential buyers... Who knows?

All rendered at 6K with minimal postwork. The hill/golf course/church behind the site is all 3D.

Never tile again...

I am sure you're all very much aware of the plugins "Multitexture" and "Bercon Tiles", many of you have been using them and blogging about them for years now.

Just recently however Multitexture and Bercon Tiles were updated to work with eachother meaning you can now use multitexture to randomly select bitmaps and Bercon Tiles to arrange them in whatever pattern suits. Essentially this is the same as the commercial plugins "brix" and "mighty tiles" though perhaps an ever so slightly more convoluted workflow.

To any of you not in-the-know about these plugins and wondering what the benefits are over using decent high-res maps:

1. The textures are generated procedurally, meaning there will never be any visible tiling artefacts.
2. The plugin allows randomisation of Gamma, Hue & Saturation of individual bricks/tiles.
3. The base textures can be of a higher resolution than a standard bitmap meaning no reduction in quality at close proximity
4. It is considerably easier to go out and take pictures of a dozen individual bricks/tiles close up than it is to find a whole, flat pristine wall to photograph and then make seamless.
5. Used in conjunction with the composite map and UV Unwrapping, very complex and believable textures can be achieved with minimal effort.
6. Major render farms support Multitexture and Bercon Tiles, whereas they may not support other third party brick/tile plugins.

There are of course a couple of disadvantages too:

1. Set up time - for a basic texture it will be much the same as setting up mapping on a normal bitmap image, however if like me you want more complex setups this can start to become a bit of a headache...
2. Because it is generated at rendertime, viewing the bricks/tiles in the viewport doesn't work properly.
3. More RAM usage (I haven't tested this, but logic dictates that using many high resolution textures will use more RAM than a single high resolution texture)

If there is enough interest in setting up textures using these two plugins, I will happily write a tutorial/walkthrough on it. In the mean time, for those of you that want to give it a go yourself here are a set of textures I shot and used just recently...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5cPd0BuCqoFTUVJOUxoNmxDMDA/view?usp=sharing

Windows explorer crashing

Hey arch-vis folk,

Not much of an update here but our office has recently had s spate of windows explorer crashing fairly frequently; somebody noticed that it only happened when navigating into folders containing Sketchup files and we managed to replicate the issue over and over again.

Whilst there isn't currently a fix from Sketchup (they are aware of the issue) there is a temporary fix that you can do yourself. If you navigate to the Sketchup program files and find a file called "ThumbsUp.dll" and rename it to something else such as "ThumbsUpOld.dll" then this will fix the issue and doesn't appear to affect Sketchup in any way.

Feeling neglected

Sorry for not updating the blog as regularly as I should do...

A few shots from a project I've been working on the past few weeks. Have had a multitude of problems trying to import from Revit and ultimately ended up having to sack off the file link in favour of bringing it in as simple .fbx geometry.

Try not to get too excited though, they are only speculative offices on an already heavily industrialised site. I have uploaded the original 24 megapixel renders, but the blog appears to have resized them. I shall try to do some detail crops soon.

Stressful times...

Been a while since an update which is something of a recurring theme here it seems, so I thought I'd just post something to let you know I am still very much alive and well; just extremely busy with various 3D projects.

I'd wager that given the current workload we are definitely coming out of a recession, and fast. That is of course provided nobody does anything to mess it up; yes Putin I'm looking at you.

On a side note I've recently got the office to invest in Railclone Pro and quite frankly I don't know how I've managed without it before; the sheer number of hours put down to working out stairs, handrails and so on..!

Sorry this isn't much of an update, merely a bit of a ramble but I shall endeavour to get some more images and projects uploaded here as soon as I can.

What's going on?

Well, obviously given the time away from the blog I suppose it would be good practice to wish everybody a very merry christmas, and also a very happy new year...

Rhodes

Just a few holiday snaps from when I went to Rhodes 2 weeks ago. Lovely place...