Placing Rendered Building Into A Site Picture

[Anonymous]

I am trying to take rendered house and use the picture of the site as background as well as forgound. My first thought was to use the mesh of the site as an operator element and the walls above and below grade as the Target Elements and do a downward extrusion. NO LUCK could not get the SEO to work with a mesh. Am I missing something or do meshs not work as operators? Or is there another way to accomplish this without going to a post rendering program.

Thanks
Jim

[MMontgomery]

Have you considered Photoshop? It would be able to place that in the scene through layer manipulation, masking and the clone tool.

[Djordje]

jmaul wrote:
I am trying to take rendered house and use the picture of the site as background as well as forgound.

The background is obviously no problem, but for the foreground you will have to do some Photoshop layering.

jmaul wrote:
My first thought was to use the mesh of the site as an operator element and the walls above and below grade as the Target Elements and do a downward extrusion. NO LUCK could not get the SEO to work with a mesh.

If you mesh is just the top surface, meaning zero thickness, it cannot be used as an operator. It has to have thickness.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Solid ops with meshes works fine, with Djordje's caveat. But, as others said, just doing this in Photoshop with masks and layers is probably much easier and will give a more attractive result since you'll be futzing with the blend of the foreground snow anyway.

I would definitely adjust the levels of your background image in PS ... and if you have PS CS (8.0), I'd use the new quick-tool that lets you lighten the shadow areas a bit (or, if the original image is in RAW format, increase the exposure during import ).

You can do an artistic insertion, of course, but it is helpful to have something to judge the scale 'right'. This is after the fact, of course, but if when you take a photo like that, you have a survey pin somewhere near the snow bank where the garage is going, and you can mount your camera on a tripod so as to get exactly the same shot... take one picture with someone holding a piece of lumber/etc of known length at the pin, and another shot without. Or other such tricks, just to give something to help judge scale when you go into Photoshop and layer and scale things. (Using the ArchiCAD or Artlantis site insertion tool on a scene like this is essentially impossible.) Try to make your ArchiCAD camera match your real camera's position and settings so that the perspective is as close as possible, too.

(If that short wall on the left is mapped on your survey, then model it and use the visible end to help judge your AC camera position and scale.)

I encourage you to purchase Dwight's book, Illustratration in ArchiCAD. The Sunlight and Ambient light colors in your ArchiCAD settings should be changed to reflect the cooler tone of light in the photo... you can of course play with such tonal things in Photoshop as well, but only so much IMHE.

Hope that helps some ... this is all fun stuff - hope you have time to experiment and enjoy it rather than be under a deadline to take the fun out of it! 🙂

Karl

[Dwight]

I encourage you to purchase Dwight's book, Illustratration in ArchiCAD. The Sunlight and Ambient light colors in your ArchiCAD settings should be changed to reflect the cooler tone of light in the photo... you can of course play with such tonal things in Photoshop as well, but only so much IMHE.

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Color adjustments AND layer management!

Achieve this interleaving by copying foreground elements to a top layer and rendering the building against a white background - ArchiCAD makes a clipping path around the model form in the rendering to make the cut and paste easy. Then you can put many design alternatives into the context.

And a final plug for ArchiCAD University West in three weeks: Big parts of my lecture address issues with models in photographic context. I'll be looking for victims to provide images as examples - why don't you bring something?

[Anonymous]

Guys thanks for all the help!!! I do not have a copy of photoshop (first project to come across the desk needing high quality photorendering) and homeowners meeting is tomorrow am. But I do have paranesi and have painted the foreground (very poorly I might add). In regards to scale I do have photos coming this afternoon containing story poles with red flags on top for each of the roof corners and have been able to scale the model up and down and left to right. Homeowners want to be able to pickup flags in the picture and compare to the poles on site thus the reason for transparency of the building. Like to get your guys comments/opinions on photoshop or art-lantis. Very fun stuff and would love to come to the university but we have just had are third baby (another boy) will have to change my signature picture here in a little bit.

Thanks again,

Jim

[Karl Ottenstein]

jmaul wrote:
Like to get your guys comments/opinions on photoshop or art-lantis. Very fun stuff and would love to come to the university but we have just had are third baby (another boy) will have to change my signature picture here in a little bit.

Congrats on your new addition! PS and AL serve completely different purposes of course... but I would suggest starting out with Photoshop Elements (2.0 is current I believe) which is only around $50, and is even bundled free with some cameras/printers/etc (might get a copy from a friend who has the CD and isn't using it).

The nice thing about Elements is that the interface is nearly the same as Photoshop, shortcut commands are the same and so if and when you're ready for all of the power of PS, the transition will be easy. There is so much to learn about PS, that starting out with Elements is a cheap way to begin ... and may be all you need in the end. PSD files created in Elements are fully usable in full PS.

Full PS ($$) has many more features. For me, layer masks are the biggest one that I have a hard time giving up when I'm at someone's office with only Elements....but the basic features of layering, adjustments and transformation in Elements are all one really HAS to have IMHO.

Karl

[Anonymous]

Karl,

Thank you very much for the information regarding PS, will be purchasing element asap (in addition to Dwight's book). Thanks again for all your help!

Jim