I am thrilled to be joining the jury for the inaugural #ArchitizerVisionAwards, a global award honoring the best in architectural representation!
Learn more about the Vision Awards and register here: https://info.architizer.com/vision-awards
visualisation
The Anywhere House Latest Images… /
We’ve been hard at work on the Anywhere House in recent months and so to show the latest design tweaks here are some brand new renders that we’ve created.
Torogips, Spain /
Over the last year we’ve been designing a small office building to accompany a new gypsum factory in Spain. Our building will house the changing rooms, laboratory, office and dining room. The inside of a gypsum factory can be a relatively dark and dusty place and so our main objective has been to create a light filled, airy alternative to that. Working with a very modest budget we have concentrated on drawing northern light into all the spaces to ensure that there is a good quality of light throughout the day.
The material palette will be very simple, with painted concrete block for the walls, expanded metal mesh shutters over the windows and a polished concrete floor internally. On the roof we plan to use Cumella Ceramic tiles. The colours aren’t yet confirmed, but I’m inclined to be bold and go for the pattern shown…
Construction will hopefully start this autumn.
Tokyo Comp /
I created the Tokyo Penthouse images a couple of years ago, purely as a portfolio piece blending photography and CGI together. I was looking back at them and thought it would be good share these images of the various stages of creating the image - the raw photograph from the studio, the quick render with a 3D model person as a placeholder to help set up the shot, and then the final composition. When you're after lifestyle images of a property that hasn't been built yet, this is the creme de la creme.
360 of Joshua Tree House /
Just for fun here's a 360 of the living space at the Joshua Tree Residence. For best effect view it on your phone and then spin round!
Emulating the landscape of Joshua Tree /
Over the last few months, I have been designing a house for a private client in Joshua Tree, California. As the design developed I thought that it was something that would catch a little bit of attention in the press if I showed it in its best possible light (I never imagined it would go viral). I was already using the computer to make simple 3D maquettes and with the design locked off, it was fairly straightforward to build a detailed model of the house on the computer. The context was the real challenge. The client had provided me with a topographical site plan as a PDF, which I had been sketching over. He had also provided me with photographs of the site, but the photographs weren't quite sufficient for me to use to make some nice images of the scheme - I wanted to be able to surround the building with context, in 360 degrees, so that we could get the shadows and reflections across the building. To solve the context problem I devised this rather satisfying workflow which I thought warranted sharing.
First of all I opened the pdf in Adobe Illustrator and exported it as a DWG. I then opened the drawing in Autocad and scaled it to the right size, cleaned it up, and joined fragmented contours into continuous polylines (I later realised that this could have been done automatically in 3DS Max with SiNi plugins). This drawing was then imported into 3DS Max and each contour was raised to its correct height (this was tedious and I'm unaware of any shortcuts).
With the contours set out in 3D space I then used the Terrain Compound Object to create a surface from the contours. This generates a surface that is detailed but an ugly mesh to work with - it's all triangulated.
At this point, I identified some areas around the building that where cliffs and rocks, rather than sand surfaces. I duplicated the terrain surface, drew a 2D polyline around the area that I wanted to be more detailed and cropped the landscape surface down.
I then took the cropped down landscape surface and retopologised it using SiNi Software's Sculpt plugin. This gave me a localised area of the landscape that was turned into a neat quad poly surface.
Next, I centred the surface's pivot point to the centre of the surface and then added a point helper to the scene and aligned it to the pivot point. This is to help align the detailed surface in the right place, later in the process.
Now I did a quick UVW Unwrap on the surface.
I moved the surface to 0,0,0 in model space and exported it to Mudbox. (I found that if I didn't move it to 0,0,0 first I had difficulty viewing the mesh in Mudbox.) With the UVW mapped, nicely regular mesh in Mudbox I could work detail into it easily, before taking it back into 3DS Max and using the helper to locate it in the right place.
The final step was just to adjust the original, main landscape surface so that the detailed surfaces sat over it well. I made a bunch of rocks in Mudbox and then used Forest Pack Pro to scatter these and vegetation over the landscape.
SiNi's plugin was really the kingpin in this process. If you do visualisation work and aren't familiar with SiNi I recommend that you check them out.
Space Baby at 3DS Max London User Group /
On Wednesday evening I'm presenting my work and, in particular the making of Space Baby, at the 3DS Max London Users Group. I'll be showing some of my workflow and how I created Jack's space suit with Marvellous Designer.
For more information go to - https://www.meetup.com/3DSLondon/
Come along and say hello over a pint.
If you've not been before you should, there's always interesting stuff being shown (this week being a perfect example) and beer - a winning combination!
Inner Working /
This visualisation is of a proposed 8 storey office building, with retail and coffee shop at ground floor. You can compare the final image with the computer model below to see what we did in 3D. I prefer to create as much of the image as possible in the 3D model and keep photoshop work to a minimum. Partly that's just how I like to work, but it has the giant benefit that it increases our ability to adopt client changes as late into the process as possible, and minimise the impact of that one final tweak to the design.
Two worlds collide in Tokyo Penthouse /
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.
Spitfire in the Dark /
I'm working on a project at the minute that needs a good Spitfire model and so having spent some time getting it looking all nice I did this for a bit of fun.