Advice/ Critique

[Anonymous]

removed

[Dwight]

Like you want an essay on the myriad problems with this image.

Here's the main problem: lack of under-soffit lighting.

Create a sun object at -90 degrees and have it NOT cast shadows.
This is how you light the undersides of things.

[Anonymous]

Revised with under sun. Still not doing it. Any more advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Dwight]

— You said that you've backed the glazing. Let those spaces be rooms with curtains. Make the glass more reflective.

— make the reflecting pool [?? on the right?] water instead of flat.

— All the soffits are repeating patterns. Lose this pattern.

— look in the LightWorks archive for a better brick pattern. use a shader instead of a texture.

— likewise the concrete.

— with undersun, the soffits should be brighter - fix the blackness with a material change.

— if you are concerned about the dark foreground, add ambient light, a skyobject or change sun position. Or combine all three.

[Anonymous]

Dwight, Thanks, working on it. What is the difference between texture and shader? Never heard this.

[Dwight]

In your rendering, you see the repeats of an image used to replicate a surface texture. Archicad's ancient image library is full of poorly-made images that have not been manipulated to appear "seamless". They are obviously repeating - you sense each rectangular image.

A shader is a mathematically-generated pattern that is infinite and seamless. LightWorks has many of these in the archive where textural surfaces are represented by their image pattern and shaders by a spherical symbol.

[Anonymous]

Wow. For years I've been creating materials, never with these results. Is there anywhere I can get more of these files? Thank you for this tid bit. Can't wait until I get your book and find out how big of an idiot I've been.