Tutorial
Here’s the rambling chat that I did this morning on @ArchitectureChat Instagram feed. I hope you enjoy it and if you have any questions write in the comments section below and I will try my best to answer them for you.
Hope you’re all staying safe and well!
It was lovely to meet the students and tutors up in Aberdeen last week. Thanks so much for the invite to come and speak, it was a hoot!
I've just been doing some concept design work in 3DS Max. With the design finished I needed to extract a 2D drawing that I can clean up in Autocad and then pass on to the set builders. It's a little bit of workflow that is always helpful to do with architectural projects, say when you're working on a competition, but can be a bit of a pain.
Well, I'm quite pleased with this workflow in the end. I viewed my 3D model in elevation or plan and drew splines over it using the 2.5 snap. This is pretty quick to do but can leave you with lines floating all over the place in 3D space which are then a pain to work with in Autocad. Scribe by SiNi Software has a flatten spline button, and with a click of a button your splines are all flattened to the C-Plane. Ta da!
This is a little tutorial for SiClone, a neat 3DS Max plugin that I’ve been using recently by SiNi Software - https://www.sinisoftware.com/
If you have any questions or queries please ask away in the comments section below and I'll try my best to help, and if you enjoy the tutorial please sign up to our newsletter so we can keep in touch - http://eepurl.com/cf3NM5
Geeky, I know. Extremely!!
I was chatting to someone last night about light fields and it reminded me just how mind blowing they are. Essentially a light field camera captures 4D light information rather than 2D like a traditional camera - rather than recording a flat image it records the light levels in a volume allowing you to do all manor of clever things in post-production.
For anyone interested in exploring the frontier but is short for time check out this video,
For anyone hungry for more intel this podcast from the CG Garage Podcast delves in deep(ish).
I've posted this in the past but, hey, it's fun. A little break down of how we merge the real and the unreal.
You can see the final images here.
If you enjoyed this tutorial sign up to our newsletter to hear about future lessons and as promised in the video here is a link to some of Bernd and Hilla Becher's work.
People often ask me how does CGI work, or how do I create my images and I've always felt like I wasn't giving a particularly good answer so I've made this short video as an introduction for the uninitiated.
If you like the video be sure to follow us on Facebook - facebook.com/WhitakerStudio/
and Instagram - instagram.com/whitaker_studio/
And signup for our newsletter to receive a 3D model of the cup - whitakerstudio.co.uk/how-does-cgi-work-newsletter-signup
A free piece of 3D software for you to play with is Sketchup - sketchup.com/
Since experimenting with 360 videos last week, Facebook have now introduced 360 photographs and it turns out it is incredibly easy to produce and upload cg images, although it does require you to go through a couple of steps. So here is a little tutorial for anyone needing to create 360 content.
We use 3ds Max and V-Ray here at WS so the first part of this tutorial will describe the settings specific to our pipeline, but can be translated to other renderers. The second part will look at what you need to do to prepare your rendered image for upload to Facebook, regardless of software used.
Set up your camera as you normally would.
Render settings are largely the same as your normal preferences, however under V-Ray > Camera select Spherical Panorama for type and check Override FOV, entering 360.0 for the horizontal override and 180.0 for the vertical override.
Finally, Facebook needs your image to be in a 2:1 ratio with the maximum recommended dimensions being 6000 wide by 3000 high.
Now you can hit render! We normally save out as 32-bit EXR with render passes and you can still do this, editing your image in Photoshop as you see fit before saving out as a jpg.
With your image rendered you now just need to add some additional information into the EXIF data so that Facebook interprets it as a 360 image rather than a normal flat 2D image.
For this you need to visit theexifer.net. Upload your image and then click eXif.me. Here we need to enter Ricoh for Camera Make and Ricoh Theta S for Camera Make. This will fool Facebook into believing that the image was taken with a recognised 360 camera.
Now you can download your photo with its corrected EXIF data and upload it to Facebook.
For anyone wanting some further reading here are a couple of helpful links:
