The office building is finished and can be viewed below. The idea for this project was to create an Architectural rendering based on a single reference photo and to incorporate an HDR into my work flow to produce photorealistic results. My demo reel page has been updated with the most recent cut which includes this piece.

So over the past couple week I learned how to use Maya’s Fur system to create grass. Due to the large amount of grass in the scene, I had to render each patch in its own layer so mental ray wouldn’t crash. I painted length maps to create the “mowed” effect. This week I’m working on camera moves and I’m wrapping up any last minute changes before I render this out. I plan on having the whole piece completed before Sunday.

I’ve began working on texturing the building. I’m going out tomorrow to shoot a brick texture for it, but until then you can see what I did with the glass. There is some additional modeling added as well.

Yesterday was my day to go out and shoot my HDR panorama for the office building as planned. The shoot went great and it was a perfect day to be outside. The clouds were exactly how I wanted, but I soon found out that they posed a small problem. First I had to shoot the sky as fast as I could so that the clouds didn’t move and fortunately it wasn’t too windy that day. Also if a cloud passed over the sun I would have to wait until it’s shadow cleared the field.  Here is the tonemapped lat/long version of the HDR:

Also here is the HDR being implemented into my office building scene using HDRShop’s Lightgen plugin. 2 minutes and 30 seconds render time at Full HD resolution.

Comparing this to the renders with mental ray’s Physical Sun and Sky (as shown in my previous post) there is more contrast and less desaturation making for a much better render. Now this isn’t the final lighting rig, but merely a good start. It needs more work with the shadows and I’m curious how it will look animated.  Most likely I’ll need to tweak the FG settings over the next couple weeks.

So for this quarter I am working on a single project for two classes. It’s an multi-story office building exterior lit using an HDR. Up to now I have most of the modeling done and some of the texturing started. Within the next few weeks I’ll be experimenting with Maya fur and how to use it to create grass. As of right now it is being lit with mental ray’s physical sun and sky, but will be replaced with an HDR within the next week (shooting it on Monday). Here is the progress so far: