Casa Folha - Leaf House Exterior (Sketchup+Vray)
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after being member of this forum for about three years now and profiting so much from all the valuable hints, tips and plugins i wanted to share my latest work. although i have not been posting for the longest time (everything was already answered) i was always actively following this forum.
the project: i discovered this beautiful and genius leaf house (casa folha) by architects patalano&mareines on the web and was fascinated by the complexity and shape of the structure (see pictures here: http://openbuildings.com/buildings/the-leaf-house-profile-39231 ).so i thought i´d give it a try and rebuild it in sketchup for training purposes.
as it turned out it was an insane idea. with nothing but the few drawings (jpg) available on the web i tackled the challenge and was sometimes close to giving up. i started the whole project in c4d but quickly switched to SU as i really underestimated the complexity of the roof structure and failed to do it in c4d. with the help of all the plugins available by the kind members of this forum it was finally possible. here is a first shot rendered in vray. i hope i can post follow up views if time allows.
your feedback, critics and hints are very welcome!
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Great stuff mate, I'd love to see a birds eye render as that's an interesting design
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WOW great model and render. Looks like you have loads of detail there.
Any chance of closer renders to see those rafters. -
i´m going to add more views as time allows. birds view is in work
there are lot of details in there and i have to figure out some nice camera angles to let you see the nice roof structure which is made of two layers (inner & outer) and the fitting rafters and columns.the biggest problem was to assemble all those organic shapes together and fit in the rafter structure - i pulled out some hairs while figuring out a way to accomplish that
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Great model, love the way you've textured the roof
John -
fantastic render! You can see all the effort youve put into it!!!
Love the detail1May I as how you modelled the ridge? Or is that a material with displacement?
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Very intricate work Castromann. Did you manage to get some to the floor layout plans done, even in sketch form. I would be interested in seeing how the house 'works'
Mike
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Wa....ow!
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@unknownuser said:
May I as how you modelled the ridge? Or is that a material with displacement?
the roof and the ridge were complicated. i first made outlines for the complete leaf shape with splines. then i used curves (z-height) to connect the separate leafs to the center. with that shape finished i was able to build the bearing wood beams (extrude tools) and wood beams that run to the center of the building overhead. inbetween each leaf there are shared beams runinng to the middle as well. this were done with the same method as the overhead beams. still from the spline shape i isolated the tensile structure boarders for the half of each leaf (12 segments alltogether)and did a redraw to fit the overlapping. now i used edges by rails (drawing only profiles)to get the even subdivision for the small rafters running along the roofs inner side and extruded them along path with the beam shape - rafters done!
again with extrude edges by rails i skined the 12 separate shapes. first the inner part the runs exactly along the bearing wood shape but overlaps to the sides and then the outer skin which uses a slightly modified version of the inner skin to give it the smooth bubbely shape (note: each leaf on on side of the house uses a completly different base shape). finally i connected inner and outer skin.
in the end i did the intermediate beams the run inbetween the bearing beams and the shade panels that you can see on the front and back of the house.
the precision needed to get it all working in the end was exhausting in parts. although now it sounds quite easy i needed a lot of thinking to figure out this workflow. a tricky part for example was to calculate the angel needed to get the rafters overlap with the bearing beams and still run along the skin and not through it.
the overhead roof shingles (the ones running to the center) were done with component stringer.
hope that answers your question?
i´ll post some monochromatic detail views shortly.
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@mike lucey said:
Very intricate work Castromann. Did you manage to get some to the floor layout plans done, even in sketch form. I would be interested in seeing how the house 'works'
Mike
unfortunately i didn´t do sketches. all the reference i had were the jpg drawings and images you can find following the link of my first post and my visual judgement.
in the detail shots i will remove some parts of the roof. so you can see inside the structure easily. i think that will help with "understanding" the house....
had to look up the meaning of "intricate" - love that word already
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Looking forward to the cutaways
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as promised the monochromatic detail shots - i didn´t have the time to play around with the lighting so please excuse for the the mediocre quality.
more pictures with textures to come another day.
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@unknownuser said:
Nice shape....The leaves look like hulls, specifically the Peterborough Cedar Strip from the 60's. The ribbing and gunnels are much the same...if it rains hard they can just flip it over and move on...
yes, actually they do - that´s what i call functional architecture. the guy that lives there is called noah, favourite hobby: collecting animals
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That is an amazing model and a great render!
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very beautiful model of this casa. the render materials needs to be addressed more.
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you´re absolutely right about the textures and materials. looking at some of the work on this forums there is still a lot of potential for improvement in terms of photo-realism.
i´m trying to catch up with Vray for SU but found it hard to get the right hdri/ sun light balance and look for my materials so far. another thing that makes it hard for me with this model is the fact that you simply cannot texture most of the shapes arcs, skins satisfyingly directly in SU and i really failed to work myself into external UV mapping so far. it looks like so much work to export every single curved beam to external UV mapping application just to apply the texture (and all those UV applications i tried so far are everything but intuitive IMO). maybe it isn´t if i just jumped into it and tried
edit: in the meanwhile i could stick to B/W rendering - covers the texturing and accounts for the model
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Castromann, thanks for posting the 'guts' of the project ..... I think my 'intricate' description was accurate
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ok - here is another shot i wanted to share. this time i used kerkythea MLT (metropolis light transport) for the rendering. it was my first try with kerkythea and think i fell in love with it
although its quite outdated and works only in x11 emulation mode on osx its free and it produces great results with much less setup time than vray. the grass and plants were placed with kerkys instancing brush (great tool). a lot of things could have been done with more attention to detail (for example grass, plants were placed directly from the repository without further tweaking) but i´m quite satisfied for a first try. with some tweaking in the MLT engine and a little more time to let the grain clear up completely this could easily get my preferred render engine (or thea probably).what´s your experience with kerkythea?
here´s the shot:
here i played with depth mask:
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another update: here is a blueprint version of the building. for those of you who don´t know those tutorials already (some of the best i´ve ever seen online) checkout this link http://www.alexhogrefe.com/tutorials/
and another one following the daylight tutorial from the link mentioned above - not the best model for it but you can guess that this is a powerful technique.
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WOW! so great... great renders as well... even with the outdated kerkythea! you should try thearender, musch easier and more features
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