Exterior renders

[Anonymous]

I am not able to develop nice exterior renders. I am happy with the interior renders I can make. Can you share your settings or tips to have a nice exterior render. Advantages or disadvantages of physical cameras...

[Barry Kelly]

You might find it best if you list a few points about what you don't like about the external renders.
And maybe post some images if you can.

Barry.

[Erwin Edel]

Before rendering, get a good composition for your shot. 54 degree view cone comes close to human eye (no uncomfortable fish eye lens looks!), basic rule of thirds composition (by approximation) ussually works well, I find. Two point perspective button is my friend too. Save your camera in a path for future use.

I use special renovation filter (called Presentation) that I use to hide all my birds, trees, people etc from the technical model. I make more of these for each camera as needed.

If the modelled surroundings becomes too complex, I sometimes have a seperate PLN for this and hotlink the building model in to the 'terrain' PLN.

After this, proceed as below.

Start with Outdoor Daylight Fast (Physical).

Untick Detailed Settings (if that is ticked).

Pick a nice physical sky under Environment (I like Friendly Afternoon). Make sure Use ARCHICAD Sun Position is ticked, or your settings for sun altitude and azimuth won't be used.

Tick Detailed Settings.

Go to Environment > Physical Sky > Clouds. Turn off Cast Shadows (looks rubbish, IMO).

Go to Global Illumination, pick Preset Exterior Preview. If you find the render to have too many 'dark spots', up the setting to Preset Exterior Physical Sky (expect an increase in render time of about 4x).

Go to Options > General Options. Set Ray Threshold to 0 to have reflective surfaces look their best (IMO), or at a very low value to have some reflections show. Set Ray Depth to around 12 or higher depending on how many planes of glass are visible in the shot. 12 works for me in most projects. Do the same for Reflection Depth. Tick Generate Alpha Mask if you intend to swap out the background of the Physical Sky for a picture in a photo editor (make sure you save your image as PNG with 'High Accuracy Color with Alpha Channel' to have the transparancy mask available).

Consider printing size. I render out my images at 195x135 mm, 300 DPI. These still print fine when sized up to A4 full sheet on a decent printer.

Make sure Apply Render Safe Frame is ticked.

Hit render button.

With these settings a typical project render takes less than 3 minutes on my old workstation.

I then add some sketch render channels and do a bit of photoshop watercolour effects + desaturating of colours etc and get results as below.

These are our typical renders that need to be reproduced often for the client when design changes are made. It takes max. 5 minutes to do, and by using layer effects in photoshop, it becomes copy + paste of a few images and merge layers down to show changes for a new render.

Might not be your preferred style of presentation, but we are happy with the results.

[Anonymous]

This is my example. Basically I am looking forward for best defined contours for the different elements and bright surfaces. Specially in exterior renders I always notice if a blurry filter is affecting all the picture.

[Erwin Edel]

I hear you on the contours, especially profiled elements in one surface with the light hitting them in such away you don't get much there in terms of shadowed areas.

This is why we overlay a sketch and just go for the sketched watercolour like approach.

We make a layer group in photoshop where we have our sketch renders (we often use different style pencil for contours, vectorial lines and the interior) in layers with the top ones having 'multiply' to show them all. We then have our colour render sit on top of this with a colour burn. This makes all but the most white areas give the lines a slight tint of colour. Then multiply this group with about 50% fill to make it more subdued.

I'm sure if you dial up the global illumination far enough, properly facet all of your 3D model etc etc you'll eventually get nice defined edges where you would expect in the world of photo realism, however we live in the world of billable hours and sacrifice that holy grail of perfect render for having it done quickly.

I also find that some clients are almost afraid to engage in discussion over the design if we hit them up with super realistic renders that look like the final product, the sketchy look helps with that too.

P.S.
A trick that works if you have a 'busy' terrain in 3D and it happens to be flat (yay for working in one of the flattest parts of the world!), you can just cut your model at the terrain height with 'Cut Elements in 3D', hide your terrain layers and render a sketch of just your building, flock of birds, trees, ladies with shopping bags etc. You won't have to worry about having a thick sketch line on the horizon either. That does mean taking some artistic liberty with things like kerbs having 0 height (everything being in one plane).

[Erwin Edel]

Also remember you are trying to 'sell' your design. Taking some artistic liberties in favour of realism is fine in my book. I generally dial the sun in to a 45 degree of which ever corner of the building I am looking at, with an altitude of around 55 degree for some friendly shadow casting, even if that side of the building would never see the sun.

Stick your camera at eye height (1650 mm), face it up until you see the top of the building and some air, hit the 2 point perspective button and see if that looks like a good presentation of the building.

For your image, I'd move the camera back a bit, try to show more than one side of the building in the shot, draw a bit of pavement to lead up to entrance and guide the viewers eye there.

You can try using some light sources to illuminate the interior a bit. There is a great 'general light', that is basically just a sphere of light that has an 'endless reach' button. It can fill an entire space quite evenly with light, especially for daytime renders. Make sure you turn on the lights in cinerender settings to see it.

You could make an entire lighting plan, but this will increase renders times a LOT and for an exterior render, that seems a bit over the top.

Consider the refraction of glass in your camera position too. Glass view at an angle will reflect more and show less of what is inside. If you want to show a particular interior part of the building, you should be looking at it relatively head on.

Take a look around the web / magazines for photographs and artist impression you like and try to analyse a bit what it is that makes them work. Also take note of the lens flared abominations that don't work and why they look odd (inserted stock photo people with shadows at the wrong side, things like that).

[Anonymous]

Thank you I will try that.

[Anonymous]

Erwin wrote:
..., properly facet all of your 3D model etc etc ...

What do you mean with properly facet? Does it means to cut the corners of the elements to get reflexions from them?

[Erwin Edel]

If you look at furniture and walls around you nothing has a knife edge sharpness on the corners, everything has a little facet.

Your walls, slabs etc in ArchiCAD all have sharp corners. If you'd want photo realistic defined edges, you'd have to start faceting stuff.

I don't recommend going down that route, though! Leave that to the photo rendering studio pro's and smart software solutions or whatever they use (mostly cheap labour, probably!).

[Anonymous]

I ve got something that I am happy, but not still perfect.
I post a pic with some notes. Could help me with the issues of the rendering.

Regards