[Michael Betke]

I worked on very nice and interesting project during the last days/weeks.
A further client from renewable energy sector who is specialized in production of biogas facilities asked me to visualize the production cycle from biomass to heat and gas in a realistic aerial rendering. Mostly this kind of technical stuff is beeing done with shematic views and visually not appealing. We decided to do a center element agricultural building with the fermentation units in Corporate design (blue). Some of the elements were done by me in a further job by designing 3D Interfaces for the control units the company delivers too (also rendered in Maxwell).

For the vegetation I used Maxwell proxies heavily of course and used ForestPack Scatter to distribute the proxies around.
This is the rendering without textboxes which the client will do by himself. The source image was 5000px so lots of the small details of the gas production could be seen.
Technical I was not sure how to post-edit an aerial rendering. I studied photos on google but they are looking all differently. In some the vegetation was very saturated in others a blur look was visible.
So I would appreciate comments and advise for aerial photography and post-editing.

[Bubbaloo]

Very nice! A few questions/comments:
How long did it take to export the MXS (assuming you used a 3d app)?
Are the short grasses instanced proxies too?!?
Tiled texture is visible on the roof in the lower right.
A lot of the building textures look flat. Could use some variation.
The cows look a little stiff, and all of their spots are the same.

Impressive scene!

[JTB]

Really nice work! I love the cows!

I guess the grass is simple planes with the clipmap material and z transformation for the height difference, right? It can't be proxies....

[Michael Betke]

The cow is an animated game-model I have. I just exported two different frames.
Indeed all the building walls are one texture. It's not so uncommonly that new houses have same walls here or even are the same type.

All vegetation items are proxies based on high-poly meshes reaching from 30k to 1.3million polies. I made batches of grass from around 1m and scattered them with Forest Pack Pro which I licensed for this project based on a suggestion here. Only the maize models are from my game model collection too.

The overall export from max to maxwell was around 10-15min but voxelisation took some time too. The scene even worked in Fire without problems but took 17GB ram for it hehe.

[RobMitchell]

Amazing render. The grass and trees just add so much depth to the image -- great job.

Was the concrete texture in the agricultural area made beforehand and UV mapped specifically for that shape, or were the little details added in post? That whole area looks so real.

[Bubbaloo]

Indeed all the building walls are one texture. It's not so uncommonly that new houses have same walls here or even are the same type.

True, but I was speaking of variations within the material. It just would have added to the realism of the scene.

[Michael Betke]

Yes the ground texture was done in photoshop on a uv'ed plane.