Really great design and rendering. I'd 1/2 agree with whoever it was above that mentioned the context. It's obviously an urban building but it's shown by itself which seems a bit disjointed. However I'm not sure I personally mind that all that much - a bit of artistic license. I think the important thing is that you get a good idea of what the building will really look like. Appropriate context would be great but sometimes in a time crunch you have to prioritize. Hopefully your school critics will understand that.

I really love your sky! Any hints as to where you got those? Or did you make them? I love the subtlety of them. Gives me something to strive towards. Still looks realistic but doesn't detract from the building.

Is that a garage on the bottom left? It looks like you can see through it, yes?

-Brodie

Yeah, it seems like the scale of a few things are a bit off, or just larger than I'd expect. Namely the thickness of the island countertop, the cabinet handle diameter, and perhaps even the refrigerator door handles (probably accurate but look large). Also the transition from the tile to wood flooring, not sure how that works. Seems like there should be some sort of a transition strip there. And the lighting seems a bit too....omni. I think that's giving it a bit of a cartoony effect.

Looks good though, just a few comments.

-Brodie

Looks great. Only thing I might suggest is that it looks like you wings go from the large rounded front down to a razor edge on the back side. Might look a bit more realistic if the back edge was rounded off.

-Brodie

Wow, it's looking really great now! Very dynamic camera positioning as well, really emphasizes that tower. I think it'd be interesting to see with some dark but reflective glass. I think someone mentioned that before. I'm not sure if it'd help or not but definately worth a shot I'd think.

Looks great!

-Brodie

I'm not a v-ray user so I can't give you any program specific advice, but I'd suggest putting in a bump map for the exterior (stone?) and roof materials. i think that would give the building a lot more depth, so to speak.

-Brodie

What are you using to render it?

If you hit the local lotto take a look at Benchwell.com (Maxwell Renders benchmarking website). Top on the list is a guy with 4 Intel Xeon X7350's (16 threads total) & 32 GB of RAM. Not a bad way to spend $20,000-$25,000 if you've got it.

You'll also find a lot of i7's towards the top of that list as well, though. Might give you an idea where your computer would rank in renderland.

-Brodie

Tiriki,

First, note that using components doesn't help you orbit any faster, basically it'll just make your overall file size smaller when you save.

Second, big textures aren't the only thing that cause big file sizes, that's just the most common one I see. Occasionally I'll have a file where I'm using components well, and have low res textures, and have purged but my file size still seems much larger than I think it should. In those cases I've actually opened up a blank SU file, and copy/pasted the old SU file into the blank one. This has worked for me a couple times (sort of like a super-purge). If that still doesn't work you might see if you can't post the SU file for the community to take a look at and give you more specific advice.

-Brodie

Your specs look really good to me. In fact they're almost overkill for SU, which doesn't use hardware very well (eg, doesn't recognize dual processors).

To elaborate on Thomthom's point. SU uses the processor to show the geometry and GPU for textures and shadows. Textures and shadows can be turned off while you're modeling and orbiting but you can't turn off the geometry, so the CPU is typically the more important.

-Brodie

Yeah, it may depend on the rendering program perhaps. I downsized the pixel size (keeping the ratio the same) for my wood flooring for the bedroom render challenge over in the gallery. It ended up coming into Maxwell too large or small (don't recall) so I had to resize it in Maxwell.

The workflow sounds a bit easier with maxwell if I understand you. SU just tells Maxwell what material to use so you can have totally different maps. The only reason you use the same image is so that it will translate the UV mapping properly. So I just downsize the map and use it in SU but that maxwell material that it corresponds to will have the full res version.

Yeah, that's pretty much my workflow with maxwell. I open the texture in PS and save it as a jpg with the worst possible compression quality. That does the trick for me. I think Richard even goes black and white to get the file even smaller and help with mapping the textures in SU.

One thing to be careful of, though, is changing the pixel size. I've heard that it doesn't affect how the UV mapping translates but my own experiments seem to show otherwise.

-Brodie

@thomthom said:

I thought that SU downsampled the embedded texture? Does it keep the original file and only downsample in memory?

I ran a quick test using the material I mentioned...

Material size 91,078 KB
Blank SU file 36 KB
SU file with Material textured to 1 plane 91,117

I think SU basically saves the whole noncompressed file inside itself (which would make sense, because if you go to edit the texture from SU it opens up a full resolution version of the file in your photo editing program), but it reduces the amount of pixels of that file just for display purposes within SU.

-Brodie

@sambort said:

How somebody can arrive to 100 mb file?

One possibility would be using high resolution images for your textures. I have an arroway stone texture, for example, that's a 10000x4200 png weighing in at 91mb. If I were to use that as a texture without going into PS and downsizing it, it could easily make a huge SU file.

-Brodie

Looks like you've got a good start there. Which program are you using to render? Here are the things that I see...

1. It's quite dark, could use some more light, especially with the bright outdoors. The shadow on the ground goes from very bright to very dark. Seems a bit odd to me, as if the light weren't bouncing around the room.

2. The perspective on the exterior photo seems off. Looks to me like the horizon line should be quite a bit lower.

3. I like the light coming from the stair well but it seems very intense and I'm not sure what sort of light would look quite like that (it looks like someone has a work lamp up there like you'd see in a garage pointed at the wall rather than a sconce of some kind.

I think once you take care of that sort of stuff you'll be in good shape. It looks like the best parts of the image are the ones that don't really stand out. The interior seems quite good and I love the curtains and how they fit into that reveal in the ceiling. The floor material might not be perfect either but it's hard to tell with the lighting.

-Brodie

looks very good marked. My only comment would have been on the sky and it sounds like you're taking care of that

Good job on the reflections too!

-Brodie

it's just so...beautiful

It's all relative I guess

Looks pretty good Sheik. Is that a tile flooring? Only critique would be that the background image of the skyline may be a bit too bright.

good job,

-Brodie

ditto. I added a back wall and a hallway, sort of have to do something with that mirror on the far side of the room. I think it just gives an extra opportunity for creativity.

-brodie

Stinkie, I'm sure you've posted this somewhere or another but I'm curious what your computer specs are.

-Brodie