How Can i make this picture look more realistic?

[Aussie John]

Hi nik, My opinions
1)i think you have placed too much emphasis on the sky and as a result the image looks bottom heavy. Maybe a lower view angle might look more natural.
2)Some animation might be nice ( people cars to give scale)
3)the sun in the sky tends to draw they eye away from the building doesnt coincide with the general shadow direction.
4) the light is very cold and uninviting
I do wonder why you havent set the sun direction from top right to give some shadow articulation to the terrace side. This afterall appears to be the most interesting of the elevations

is it possible to get a real picture of the site to place into the background?

[Dwight]

All good comments, John.

So often we get asked about illustrations and how to improve them. The user thinks we have software tricks - ways to tweak ArchiCAD/LightWorks/Whatever to solve the image. Well, we do, but that is not the problem.

Usually, the author of the work doesn't know his [people who attend my seminars know this already] STORY.

He's got a building. There it is. But.... there's no "story." He hasn't addressed the setting of the story - time of day, quality of light, the context [cars/foliage/people].

Once you begin to assemble a story around a project - your images of that project get better through understanding.

For instance: Why would anyone put their entrance in shade? Or block the view of the front door? Or place distractions in the image. Or fail to cover building flaws with trees or entourage? Or pick an un-natural viewpoint?

I once coached an ArchiCAD user with a four story brick building to render. In the end, there was one strip of the articulated facade - and only one - that was visible in the rendering from top to bottom through a gap in street trees. Like an exclamation point, it stuck out as a vertical element in an otherwise contained and neutral composition. This why why you add the chickandthedog billboard on the sidewalk in front of that error- not a building error, a compositional one.

The irony is that often our story is the same overandover. A fine tract house with design excellence but still marketable. A fine example of the right hand giving and the left hand taking away. They all want the same thing. But just like buildings are "designed", so are images of buildings - Our colleague Robert Mariani has produced some fine exteriors of a shingle style project that just projects the smell of old leather, dancing cornstarch and floor wax [a good thing].

My answer is to experiment, but also look at classical compostitions of renderings to see how the eye is captured. Mark Burginger drew a line in red on a recent critique victim's facade and it was exactly the way I saw it - there was a nasty escape hatch for the eye into space.

In conclusion, the problems with renderings is that authors don't "look" at them enough.

I'm just starting a nightmare project - a flythrough of a condo suite. The designer doesn't know her "story" and it is going to be bad, because we are going to stumble through this chaotic space and there won't be a unity to it.

[Rakela Raul]

after those comments im speechless....let me add a micky mouse comment only:
before your final render check on the fascia, seems it should meet in all corners and it doesnt...also, the 2 whites columns might need a structural member above, or something, and look into de material for the steps, might wanna match the terrace,,nice project and dont forget to post the final, congrats

[Dwight]

It was a rant. I apologise.
I am in the middle of a nasty bit of business, mitigated by the delightful discovery that the ArchiCAD 9 bathroom taps have a whole bunch of options I never knew about.

But our colleagues are mistaken to think that the problems they experience are "technical," when they are issues of artistic judgement. Telling a guy that he should be fixing a modeling error doesn't get him closer to being a better artist: ie: producing glowing, happy images that make people say "Yes."

Perhaps we can start a list of composition flaws, or guidelines - see the web site of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators - ASAI - www.asai.order their catalog - this year's is especially beautiful.

[Dwight]

ww.asai.org

[Dwight]

They are the best.

1: decide on the composition that leads the eye into the subject of the artwork.

2: Adjust the sun color toward yellow and the ambient color toward mauve. Weaker sun and stronger ambient yields softer effects. For Lightworks, too.

3: Study art. Vermeer, not Pick-ass-o.

4: Study photography, especially studio lighting:
key, model and fill.

It is, however, about principles, not dialog box settings.

[Dwight]

vermeer: http://www.ballandclaw.com/vermeer/

[Dwight]

Things are going to change radically for you in ArchiCAD 9, but a few things in my book remain worthwhile - Illustration In ArchiCAD - if you can still get it.

This is a topic that no one masters - our expectation of what a story is evolves - edits get faster, perspectives become more extreme. There was a time when we didn't like converging verticals but who cares anymore....

Another thing - "attitude." Some people call it style, but, for example, my work exhibits more crumbly texture than the slickness that many hyper-real images do. I find that a little grainy noise softens an image for the eye and when printed appears crisper and more alive. Is that a technical trick or an artistic idea?

Take it from an old guy who used cold coffee for wash in the sky because it printed well through the diazo and once had a coffee ring built into a project as a spiral stair. They claimed an "extra."

And there's no such thing as black in the real world.

[Dwight]

The book is a good primer and addresses a problem that will always persist - merging a model into a photo - something that must occur in a photo editing application.

The argument of the book is that you always use a background image to target your camera but render against a white background. At one time ArchiCAD masked automatically against its background but not, it seems, any more. Then the model is interleaved into a layered image document so that some foreground can overlap the model image.

People sometimes argue this with me, but it is easy to see that to address the overlap and integration the cheap salesman's trick of showing the rube that he can put his building into a picture, it is easier said than done. Let me show you how to play the flute.

It has lighting ideas that remain valid because real architectural lighting is so crappy you always need to think like a photogrpher would. If you've ever attended a photo shoot of your latest interior you see what I mean.

It is a bargain thanks to Graphisoft subsidizing it. And worth it for the nude of me on page 5. Before I lost the weight. I think it is a funny book, and like every rock band's first album there's a whole life of rocking and drugs in those dense 128 pages. Bring a magnifying glass.

[Dwight]

wr1nkles wrote:
hahah, thanx dwight
I seem to have a persepective and ideal "picture" in my head, but when it comes to manipulating the software to make that picture, i get lost.

Can you describe your vision? How does it feel? Think of yourself pitching me on a story idea. Start:

"What if…"