This is almost becoming a series of mine. Design is from 1921.

Conrail EMD SD45. Same model, moving things around for the Conrail configuration. Minor Photoshop/Gimp work for decals.

I think I might finally make some money off this never ending project. I contributed to the design of the house. The garage is just a relatively simple structure. I would have done something with parapets to match the house. This was rendered in D5 Render.

I've been neglecting my interior modeling and renderings.

Something I slapped together using D5 and Blenderkit models. The Mustang is from Wire Wheels by Luis Lara Osorio. Post computer repair.

Some recent renderings from the wilderness.

This is similar to my Union Pacific SD45. Differences overall being different Flexicoil trucks; antenna location; safety light, Nathan horns; and a snow plow/pilot at the front end.

Renderings are "ink sketch" post effect from D5 Render.

Initial sample:

ABC Movie of the Week.

Pulled out.

Sketchup, Blender, D5 Sync to D5 Render. The snow is generated with a free Blender plugin. It's too heavy for Sketchup so I directly import it through Blender to D5. There's a mountain back there but I'm still playing around with D5 2.9's new terrain feature.

@panixia There's a link to grain assets but it's in a readme and it's a drx file for DaVinci Resolve. I'd look into it more this morning but at the moment I regret not having invested in a retirement plan allowing me the ability to not do anything for the rest of my life.

Thanks Mike. I'll have to check that out.

Panixia, the specific video that references the LUT I downloaded is below. There's a lot of videos that are more or less about "what's wrong with movies today." My favorites of late are "Papillon" and "In the Heat of the Night." There are many.

Maybe we can start a trend along with Hollywood? It hit me watching these videos about "today's videos" how this can apply to modern day architectural renderings and trends. You can learn from so much including watching Japanese carpentry videos that can apply to our craft.

Noise and grain...

Thanks Mike!

I'm experimenting with an Ektachrome LUT. Got the idea from watching some "what's wrong with movies today" video on Youtube. More noise, more contrast.

Some recent 3D and renderings for a house in Mandeville Canyon, California and Pacific Palisades, California. The first renderings is a redesign by me including interior design for the garage addition. The last five is the house in Pacific Palisades with interior design and renderings by me. That house was designed by Michael Lee Architects.

Just to stir things up here's Bernie Sanders on AI.

Discuss...

Overall I'm cynical about AI but I have started using it for conceptual work and creating renderings fast which seems to garner greater interest with clients.

Most of it right now is not as advertised. Particularly with architecture. I have to put text input to create the rendering I want and right when I think I'm making headway it completely changes the design.

It's hard to control textures and materials. I went from doing some AI renderings -- on ReRenderAI -- and eventually used the same SU model to develop my own renderings. It's much easier to change colors and materials from there along with design elements.

I haven't used it in weeks. I have some success using Facebook ads to get work. It's hit and miss. Prolonged messenger chats that go nowhere. Many people literally think $900 for a set of plans is too expensive.

Everything is changing which is nothing new. From the days when I first started drafting in a land survey company. Hand drafting with technical pens on vellum. To reluctantly getting a computer and learning Autocad by way of a DOS command.

So I'm willing to use AI if and when the results work and look good and maybe get me more work or more ideas from the client. I'm still using my 20+ year old Autocad. I'm half way to 70 and have nowhere to go.

@Mike-Amos Mike, yep. I am curious about Rayscraper. I've seen some really great results.

Sometimes I think about getting Thea alongside D5. It's more work for creating a render. There are times when I think D5 is a little cartoonish. It has a lot of positives. Perhaps when I was starting out using D5.

I used Twilight on a few projects at first right after using Kerkythea for a while. That was my main first rendering engine. I think there was this other Metropolis Light Transport plugin for Sketchup to experiment with.

I neglected learning rendering even though I putzed around a lot with Kerkythea. It was with Thea render when I really started to sink my teeth into rendering.

Rich, there's a long thread of crash reports at the D5 community page. One person thanked me for bringing up the Turbo Mode bug. I just tested it with Turbo Mode on and MCE set to disabled but with temp limits. It D5 didn't crash and it took 10 minutes longer to render 6 scenes. Go figure. I didn't repeat the test. I could I suppose. Three years ago D5 had the same Turbo Mode crash bug too.

Mike. Not sure yet about changing over. I've gotten so used to this D5 workflow. For now.

I narrowed it out to Turbo Mode being enabled in my BIOS. Apparently anything over the rating on my CPU will crash D5. It's the only program that's causing this. This actually happened about 3 years ago. I had to figure this all out myself. D5 should be designed to run without making these kinds of adjustments. Like all software.

Yoni said Sketchup rolled back this update. Over at the Sketchup Forum.