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I don't get a chance to use Maxwell all that often, but over the past few months I've put together a few images... We are a very small architecture firm, so we don't usually get much time to produce images for clients. And I never have time to let these cook long enough...

I would love suggestions for lighting interiors - I have trouble with all of the skylit areas being way overexposed. I know that this is more or less correct, but I would like to be able to see both naturally lit and sunlit areas in the same space.

C&C is more than welcome.

A few new images created for a condo project:









Live/work images:








Art studio to condo conversion:




Townhomes:












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i think they're very nice. they strike me as perfect design development type images that you could show to a client.
they're not show-stoppers as far as details and materials and compositing/framing... but i think you know that.
i would love to hear some stories about your clients' reactions to the images. especially from people who are used to seeing hand renderings or elevations with color/materials.

Our clients have been extremely impressed by what we have been able to produce - not only the maxwell images, but modeling in general. We're a two-man shop, so there isn't a lot of spare time to spend perfecting models and materials... thus I use the same furniture and materials quite a bit

I had been using a simple raytracer to render out models, and our clients had been very pleased with those, so it's quite an upgrade to be doing this work. Most of our work is on single family houses or very small developments where the marketing budget is either nonexististant or extremely low. Only in the past year (using maxwell) have we begun to produce interior images - I just couldn't produce interior shots before that I considered better than terrible. We have bid some work out to have hand renderings done, but the costs are typically prohibitive for small projects. And when shown the hand rendered option (showing the client our renderer's website) versus what we can produce for less money, they have thusfar chosen to go with us.

very nice!

thanks Leo! I'd love to hear any suggestions that you have - always trying to get better at this... I know there are too many little things wrong to pick these images apart one by one, but some general suggestions on things to work on would be great.

updated images 04.26.07

jswolfe wrote:I would love suggestions for lighting interiors - I have trouble with all of the skylit areas being way overexposed. I know that this is more or less correct, but I would like to be able to see both naturally lit and sunlit areas in the same space.

you might want to try stephan stoske's noiseremove 1.5
neat little program.

www.stoske.de/digicam

it's in german though, but it's very simple.

hey Jason, ...those latest interiors are a nice bit of work.

Fastly approaching photo-status .....

@ivox - Thanks! I was just going for "slightly less horribly CG," but I'll take it.

@zoppo - I downloaded noiseremove and I *think* that I ran it correctly, but I cannot figure out what it's done. It created another .bmp in the same folder, but it doesn't look different than my original image.... or at least not that I can tell. I must be doing something wrong. Could you please give a quick rundown of how to use noiseremove? My German is horrible.... If it was in French maybe

Jason

save various tifs out of mxcl - one with eg 1/60, one with 1/125, one with 1/250, all in the same directory (the middle one should be the "correct" looking one, at least from my experience). you can also use more pics with a wider variety - but be carefull: nr will also use possible subdirectories.

noiseremover blends them together and creates a bmp. this bmp might lack some contrast, but you can of course correct that after your liking in ps.

z.

ps: of course all credit to stephan!
pps: where has my english gone ...

Great images and thanks Zoppo

Great renders, you've been busy.

Try rendering your interiors with multilight enabled. This will give you much more control over the final lighting output of mxcl.

Also gives you the opportunity to amaze your clients even more, with an ml animation.

If you aren't already doing so, check the material id tag, for the render passes. You can then use this to select materials for further tweaking in post later.

To double check the effect of noiseremove, copy the output to another layer of the original image in Photoshop and use 'difference' for the layer blending option. This will show you any change between the images.

Tim.

Thanks Tim and acqiesse, I appreciate that.

I have done a few ML renders, I just don't typically have enough time to set it all up correctly... that and my computer is not quite as speedy as it should perhaps be. I sometimes wish that I could just turn down the sun a little bit - I guess that I should just pump up the wattage on my lights a bit to even things out? I have been using real-world values, but I haven't been using fill lights like you would do on an actual architectural shoot, so I don't think I have quite enough light in my scenes.

Tim - I did double check the noiseremove, but I still couldn't tell that it was working correctly. The images were slightly different, but it looked like it was mainly exposure, not noise. As the noise is always in the same places in these shots, I don't know if noiseremove can effectively remove it. Could someone please post an image (with the original) to show what noiseremove can do? It seems like it would work on two images with different seed values, perhaps?

Jason

i posted about noiseremover because of you saying you wanted to even the overexposed and the too dark areas.

that's what it does for me.

Hmmm... yeah, that totally went over my head the first time. I just thought you were commenting on the fact that my renders are really noisy - thus I should use noiseremove

It does seem to even out some of the overexposed areas - I went back and looked at the test and the original, and the test does seem a little more balanced. That is what I had noticed when I used difference blending as well - that the highlights were what had changed. Sorry for the confusion, I didn't realize what I was supposed to be looking for.

Thanks for the tip Zoppo, I will have to try that on upcoming renders.