Mateo, the sky is made up of four exposures. It is shot from my back yard in Arizona. I walked out my back door and looked up and said wow! I knew I would never get my professional cameras unpacked before the view was gone so I grabbed my consumer camera off the kitchen table and stepped out and took four shots. I wanted higher resolution than the camera would give me so I shot one frame to the left and one frame to the right and stitched them together. I also knew that shooting onto the sun would cause me to loose highlight detail so I did two more shots of the same areas at a lower exposure. I stitched those together as well. Then I layered the two stitched images over each other with the darker image on the bottom layer. Then in Photoshop, I erased through the upper image where ever it lacked highlight detail. Finally I merged the uper and lower images.

I used PhotoShop, SU and Kerkythea.

The blurred tree is the most frequent complaint I hear about the image. In fact, when I do night/evening photography I often get the same effect from the camera (perhaps not as strong). Even a slight breeze moves some fairly mighty trees over the period of a time exposure.The bottom part of the trunk is not effected, but the upper trunk and branches can become quite blurred I may try cutting the blur back just a touch.

The image is a little more contrasty than my original. The image I posted is one that I emailed the client and I find emails often dumb down the color so I pump the contrast on images sent by email.

The comment on the duplicate bushes is right on and I think I will get rid of the bush on the right. In fact, I think it is a great time to get rid of the bush on the right.

I am surprised that no one mentioned the duplicate palm trees. I guess I got away with that by flipping them horizontally.

What program are you rendering in?

Archi, I do have one error in the reflection that I missed. That reflection is the one from the left facing wall just to the right of the rotunda. The top end of the reflection needs to be clipped which I will do. Other than that I do not see a problem with the window reflections. Reflections should not follow the road, they should just be the same distance down from the ground as the ground is from the window. The direction of the road is not a factor in reflections. The ground planes is just one big mirror when wet. Any roads or paths delineated on the ground plane would have no effect on the reflections.

I am not sure I understand the reflection comment.

Comments please. What would you do different to make this a better rendering?
Tell me what you like and what you don't like.

Thanks

The building really comes alive at night.

Please explain unbiased render for me, I am not familiar with the physics.

Thanks.

Ilya, before the electronic age there was a type of light meter called an extinction meter. I have never actually seen one, but from descriptions I believe it was like a luope with some type in the field of view and you placed different strengths of neutral density filters over the eyepiece until you could no longer read the type. This would tell you how strong the ambient light was.

Is this something like what I see in your post? It looks like a small aperature on the left leaves in light and the number of black bars you can distinguish tells you how strong the exterior light is.

Ilya, here is the xml. What will you do with it or learn from it?

This continues the series from the original post. The conclusion is that you have to pump a lot more power through a spot light than througn a point light to get it to record equally (about 10 times more).

I was having a problem with a Kerkythea render where point lights of values one and two were rendering magnificently and no light seemed to escape from rooms with spot lights of the same value. So I made up a lighting benchmark.

The yellowish train would sell as a print if you could find the right distribution channel. That is a thing of beauty.

I see influence from Edward Hopper and Maxfield Parrish in my "Ode to the Tilt Up."

I have really struggled with this one. The thin glass wo4rks in the rotunda and not in the maun part of the building. I am not sure why. The lights in the rotunda are point lights and the main build uses spotlights. The rotunda is a compoent and the main building is not.

I am burned out fighting the system but I will butt my head against it tomorrow.

I also recognize the great work. Regarding the first render, could you tell me a little more about how the interiors were done. Are they modeled or are they photoshop images applied as flat art? If you don't mind, please describe that part of the process.

The light outside the window looks cold and the light in the room seems warm. Since there is no interior light source, I would warm up the exterior just a skosh. Just a drop of yellow in the exterior portion of the light. Other than that, it looks excellent and convincing.

I just tried some ideas to see what they would do.

I understand the concept of having a building blend with the environment in the real world. However in a render, you may want to separate the building from the environment to make it stand out for the client.
Here are the things I tried:
1 Darkened the fronts of the hills and lightened the tips
2 Made the whole hill area bluer and the whole foreground warmer.
3. Made the hils ever so slightly out of focus.
4. Darkened the edges of the rendering
5. Curb was distracting as a white cut through the art so I darkened and modulated it a bit.

A couple days ago there was no paying work in house, only business development projects. Now I have a couple of jobs the clients want yesterday. I have been working until I fall asleep at the key board. I came over here to see what you guys and gals are doing as a form of taking a break.

I am really starting to enjoys Tom's style. I also like his hat.

Regarding perspective. The strong up shot works with out question. The other two I am probably OK with both, but maybe I favor the corrected perspective. I am only bother when the three point looks like a mistake. However at some point you say wow that is powerful and must be done on purpose. It when some thing is a little off that I don't feel confident in the artists intention.

Well, that was a hell of a break, now back to work.

Perception is so dependent on context and social norms. People brought up in jungles under very primitive conditions literally cannot read perspective in a photo until they are acculurated to right angle architecture and open space with a horizon.

Most of us do not pay much attention to the tops of tall buildings because we spend 99% of our time dodging traffic and reading peoples faces. I think this has a lot to do with our discomfort with strong 3 point perspective.

We are a people forced to keep our eye on the road and our nose to the grind stone.

I think I am pretty sophisticated about perspective, but something that happened to me made me rethink the power of the mind on perception. I wanted to give my wife a little well deserved vacation so I arranged to go to a Bed and Breakfast, an incredibly scenic vacation spot in Arizona. It was a Friday and she had to finish work so we we didn't get there till well after dark. We checked in an then asked the owner for directions to a good restaurant. We drove to our room in the dark to wash up. I didn't bother turning the headlights on. When we left I stepped out of the romm to enjoy the view. You could see tall pines framing a distant mountain maybe three miles away. The mountain was steep sided almost like Half Dome in Yosemite. On top was a fantastic mansion, a large circular mansion with lights blazing all around the perimiter. Just a wonderful composition in the night sky. Again I drove off without lights until I got to the main highway. At dinner we assked the waitress about the mansion on the dome shaped mountain. She did not recognize our description but we kept raving about the building and wondering how anyone could drive to the top. She said she had heard the Elvis had purchase a large hilltop mansion that he finished but never visited very often.

We drove back, to the B&B and it was late so I tuned my lights off as we entered the drive so as not to disturb other guests.

In the morning I crawled out of bed and went outside. When my wife came out I was pointing to a dome shaped building about 50 yards from our room. The "mansion" was some sort of circulation vent about two feet in diameter that also allowed light from the widowless building to escape to the outside.

What can I say, we bought the illusion 100 percent with no doubts other than we figured they must use an elevator to get to the top of the mountain. We had no doubts. It was a reality. In the day it was a bad example of some church camp architecture we could have thrown rocks to.

Seeing is believing even if it is not true. We laughed a lot and still ask each other. "Do you remember Elvis' place." Elvis ahd left the building. The mind controls our sight and our experience.

A threaded tube is an interesting special case. I did a model a thousand threaded holes. SU just did not want to deal with all the geometry even though it was a component. Moves take too much math. I just painted the inside of the whole with a set of parallel lines. In that configuration it is hard to discriminate if the lines are spiral or concentric. You might also try creating an angled jpeg pattern and painting the repeating pattern on the inside of a tube. The reason this would work well is that the inside of a tube can only be seen from a very narrow angle, so the fact that the pattern is flat would not be apparent in the final work. Animation would not work, but for a static view I think it would save a lot of useless geometry.

I think it depends on what you are trying to convey. I think architectural correction is a learned social convention like a fedora hat or nylons. It can be the accepted norm one decade and rejected the next. I prefer to look at the goal of the rendering and let that dictate the direction. I indulge in perspective correction when an air of formality is required and go toward extreme perspective for an air of dynamism and intimacy.

Tina, your comment on the foreground palm reminds me of an architectural photo job I did in Mexico many years ago. I always carry a palm branch in the back of the car so I can blot out empty ceilings, create depth on exteriors or just hide thing that can't be moved.

I did the job and get back to the border at the U.S. entry inspection station. It is hot and I can see the immigration folks hassling people. I finally get to the head of the line and the guys sticks his head in the window and says, "do you have anything to declare or any agricultural products." I answer, "nope." He looks in the back seat and sees the palm and says, "you can't bring that in." (smile - evil idea) I answer, "yes I can." Well it is no you can't, yes I can until he has a nice shade of red to go with his green uniform. He reaches in the window and grabs the fake PLASTIC palm leaf, gives me a surprised look and says, get out of here."

I think I was lucky they did not decide to disassemble the car for revenge. Today, I would probably end up in Guantanamo.