Software to Size Photo Entourage
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For people who do Photorealistic Renderings in other applications, there is no good way to size people and vegetation correctly within the perspective of their rendering.
Sort-of Kind-of is the offering of ArchVison: Composer, which works only with RPC images and only approximates for things that are sitting on the ground plane. You need to place a line where you think the Horizon line is, place a sample image with feet touching the ground and size it so the eyes rest on the Horizon line. Not really very good for a whole lot of reasons.
So I am VERY close to persuading the folks at Informatix to release a stripped down version of Piranesi for PhotoReal renderers. What I need is voices convincing them that it would be a good idea.
The "Piranesi Placer" or Photo Cutout Placer or whatever it would be called would be faily inexpensive and have only the following functions:
Placing 2D & 3D cutouts ( single and multiple) (Piranesi can do cars in a parking lot in a thrice)
Shadows
ReflectionsTo be of use, you would need a raster image file of the finished rendering without the entourage in it yet, an epix file of the underlying model and that is all! You are good to go in Piranesi Placer which will accurately place your entourage photo cutouts or even 3D components in perspective.
If your application does not create epix files, you can run it through SketchUp which does. SketchUp Pro has a epix export and for the free version there is free Ruby Script from Informatix hat will do the epix export.So could you guys use it and what price?
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Hi Susan (long time no see!)
I can imagine that a lot of folks would be interested. As little as I know about PR rendering (trying hard though), I know that this is one of the weakest part of all exteriors. Post-processing (like in PhotoShop) is tedious to get a decent result and of course, requires that one is at least reasonably "fluent" at PS. Rendering big quantity of entourage is again very time consuming.
Too bad I have never used Piranesi so I myself cannot really imagine the workflow however well you tried to explain. Tinanne has just started some PR rending work and she also uses Piranesi. Maybe if she could chime in with more imagination than I have, could be better.
How are you BTW?
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Thanks Csaba.
Working very hard but to very little end.
Send me a missive and let me know about what you are up to. -
what should I send?
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Hi Susan, Csaba
Having only recently had access to Piranesi after years of imagining that it must be great, I was pleased to find out that actually it is! Csaba, I think the work flow can best be described as photoshop for perspective visualisation, Susan I'm sure you can explain this much better than me, but I'll try. You export a scene from Sketchup as an Epix file. That view opens really as a 2d image in Piranesi but entourage, materials and effects that you add behave intelligently in correspondence to the vanishing points of the 3d scene. So whereas if you stuck a person in a visual in Photoshop, you'd have to estimate the size and perspective and then fake a shadow, in Piranesi entourage snaps to the 3d planes in the scene and is resized according to the vanishing points (obviously CS3 and CS4 have some 3d functions similar to this). Nice soft shadows too. And also for people like me that can't get their head around photoreal rendering I managed to get a pencil crayon style visual that I was happy with out of Piranesi after only half an hour of tuition.
Susan I think what you are proposing is a great idea, I need to save up and buy the full Piranesi though, just adding people into my terrible KT or Vray attempts really isn't going to make them any better!
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thanks Linea for that explanation.
Actually what allows this to happen in an epix file is that there are 2 extra channels f information being exported with the underlying tif file. Each pixel also has associated with it the name of the material assigned to it as well as the distance and orientation from the viewer relative to every other pixel.
That means that in Piranesi you can isolate areas to treat with a "paint" effect simply by using 4 different "locks" in any combination. So you can hover your paint cursor over a brick wall,say, and with the "material" lock on, it will "paint" all pixels in the model with the "brick" material assigned to it. These material assignments stay with the pixel info even if you have elected to export in hidden line mode with an all white and gray canvas to paoint on.
Further you can limit the paint so that you lock on only to this "plane" or to this "orientation" or to this precise color right under the cursor. You can "select" by using any one of these locks or any combination of. It makes the work much faster and more intelligent than PS because you can also add depth fades. Also you can make you paint choic contiguous or not contiguous.But for placing entourage it is wonderful Because it is know which pixel is behind which pixel, you can just scoot a person behind a car without all that cuting out that is still necessary in PS. When you define a height or width Piranesi can then locate your image as you move it aroun in 3D space and size it according ot the depth information correctly in perspective.
And when you have completed your rendering and your annoying client has decieded to place a door on wall where there was none, it is so simple. You expot the finished rendering as a rastor file. You open a new version of model, youimport your finishe raster file rendering over topm you locate the new door under the image because you have assigned a unique material to it and Piranesi reports it to you and you "erase" the paint over only that bit. And paint just that bit. Lots more stuff of course. -
OK, I am getting to understand it now.
This means however that no animation export is possible with it, am I correct? -
well, not in the same way as in SketchUp.
However, you can save each one of your steps and you can save all of the "positioned" entourage in a separate file.
Then when you import in an alternative view of the same model, you can easily apply all of your saved painting steps and read in the entourage which will now be positioned in the same spots relative to this view.
It also can paint up Panoramas -
@sorgesu said:
It also can paint up Panoramas
I do not really understand the rest (now) but THIS is very interesting (and of course, exciting and encouraging)
Could you elaborate, my dearest Zsuzsa?
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Egan, edesem.
Here's an answer from the Piranesi Forum:
Quote:
Originally Posted by snoopywang
Hi, Andy
If you want to make a panorama, you just need to export files from 3d software (for example: Microgds
Vedute (companion software to Piranesi)
3dStudio MAX
3dstudio VIZ
VizRenderer
Microstation )as a *.epp format.
Then you can easily realize your dream in Piranesi. Later, you just export files from Piranesi as *.mov format so that you may see it in QuickTime.
Further from another Contributor:
Each MOV file has a series of hot spots. these can be displayed in the viewer by clicking the (?) icon. try them they are quite fun, you can also zoom in or out by using the shift button to zoom in and Ctrl button to zoom out.
all the cut-outs were added in Piranese, the good thing was that as Piranesi recognises the real world locations for the cut-outs I only needed to place them once then import them for the other epp files.
obviously sparcle, lights and general softening of the image was done in Piranesi.
we will try and compress these to make them more managable for the web.See them here:
http://www.informatixsoftware.com/forums/showthread.php?t=481&highlight=panorama -
Susan,
The links are dead.
(Yet of course, I believe you - it would just be nice to see some examples...
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Try again, I replaced the link.
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Yeah, this is cool. So it's Piranesi output?
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yup yup
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OK, I am bought. Count me in as a supporter of any kind of nice development (ehm... maybe not really financially at this very moment but maybe during the next couple of months)
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except I'm talking about not having all these features at all in the "stripped down" version for the Photorealists.
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