Coffee and cakes for all. There is something to celebrate: We started our new blog or better to say, the blog is developed and we start to fill it with posts…

What will be the content of the posts? They´re about workflow, techniques, hints and other stuff. To make a long story short; we talk about projects. Sometimes from beginning to end and sometimes just special parts.

The whole blog will be written in english, because the target audiences are artists from all over the world.

Produced with the intention to incorporate a high density of vegetation, the “Golfplatz”-project was our training ground to gain some first-hand experiences with the creation and rendering of very large scenes.
The environment of a golf course seemed to be a very reasonable choice for an undertaking like this, because it incorporates a lot of different kinds of plants and foliage like the very short trimmed grass on the playing surface – the green – medium-sized plants like the rough grass and the flowers, that surround both green and lake as well as large objects with a high number of small details, like the trees with foliage made from individual leaves. We tried to recreate as many of them as possible with real, individual objects instead of textures and each type had its own unique characteristics and problems.

Right from the start we knew, that we were to create more vegetation then we could possibly render in one single pass on our machines with 16 GByte of RAM. We wanted to experiment with methods to split up a heavy scene into smaller, better manageable chunks and at the same time explore opportunities that give us the ability to change things like color, reflections and lighting without the need to re-render everything. Finding ways to handle those kinds of problems was our main motivation to do a project like this, because we wanted to experience the pros and cons of possible solutions by ourself to have this kind of knowledge ready whenever there is a customer project with similar problems.

The overview demonstrates our approach on how to split the vegetation into separate passes with the functionalities of VRay and RP Manager and how it is possible to combine the different layers to one picture in Eyeon Fusion.

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For the project “Golfplatz” we used the 3ds Max plug-in Multiscatter from Visual Dynamics to distribute the vegetation. It is a great plug-in to scatter objects on a surface. While working on the project, we noticed that Multiscatter has a few problems with distribution maps which are much smaller than the scatter surface. The next pictures are examples for such situations. The white area, the distribution map, takes up only about one-sixteenth part of the whole distribution object.

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We made this project to show how we would approach an interior visualization of an apartment. To make the whole thing more challenging and interesting, we tried to show different periods of the day so we could experiment with reaction of the materials to the different lighting situations. The most time-consuming part was the post production, because it was primarily in that time, when we decided on the final style for visualization. In the end we settled with yellow/orange colors for the lights and the ground and as a contrast the blue wall and some green vegetation.

Right from the beginning on it was important to get a real sense for the layout and the dimensions, therefore we stood in continuous contact with the friendly architect Bernhard Ortlieb for the whole duration of the project.

This overview demonstrates the way from modeling over light setup and materials to rendering and finally post production. Feel free to spend some time in the gallery and enjoy this overview.

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