Spikes distribution

Testing objects distribution depending on given colour gradient depending on needs. Done in 3ds max particle flow, inspired by many real projects.

Surface Relax & Paths 2 UPDATE

Isolation of a single module

Surface Relax & Paths 2

Continuing the discovering process and sperimentation on continous smooth and relaxed surfaces.
Floor become walls, walls become roof, roof become columns.
This time I ended with a similar stadium shape with entrance, corridors, tribune and main field, one repeated module that connect with the previous and the next creates paths and shows flows.

Big post update!

On my portfolio section I added a huge amount of images about my thesis about the Chateau de Pierrefonds

Chateau de Pierrefond Link

Chateau de Pierrefonds STAGE001

The ending video of my thesis project. One and a half year of work, more than one hundred model saved, plus than 5500 objects modeled and textured. One big crack of one of my hard disks.
Update in future...

Another image of the kindergarten. This time: panorama

kindergarten W.I.P.

I wish to share a render from my latest university project, a kindergarten.

HexAlenia: a masterplan for the Alenia area in Turin

The last lab of my university carreer. We putted a residential area, an artistic cultural center, a skyscraper with offices and a hotel, a shopping mall and an auditorium with 3 hall, one capable of 600 people and the other 2 of 320 people each.
The area was occupied by the aerospatial company Alenia.
We used grasshopper for the generation of the skyscraper: it provide the generation of the diagrid sistem, the floors and all the 7000 windows.

Triangle base pavilion

An afternoon pavilion study testing custom graphs instead of Grasshopper graphs. The graphs are used to evaluate the points on the sides of the base triangles serie.

THAToNE Skyscraper WIP

This is a skyscraper that I'm developing for an university lab.
The base model was generated in rhino with grasshopper.
This is the first preview for a first revision of the design with the teachers.

Thaaaaat Guy

First experiments in character design and animation.
Some nights ago I discovered wire parameters in 3ds Max. Thery are very useful for many purpose. My main interests are in architecture, but I can find some application for the wire parameters in architecture animations.

I build a wire control board for the parameters.
Here are some pics:

chapel

this is the final render of the chapel of the castel. it tooks a lot of time on my notebook (a.k.a. Ted)
the master desktop just arrived in the afternoon. i hope it will works till the end...

intermediate renders

here are some renders for the tesis.

final renders

These are 3 wrong mapped renders of the ancient version of the castle. Some walls and paths are missing, I'll fix them as soon as I can.
These renders are for the writed part of the thesis, so they look like videogames fortress...

Texturing ended

finally i finished the texturing of the whole castle. more than 5000 objects mapped....

here is the full size mov (16mb)

Interior finally finished

Texturing so long

continuing on texturing. But now i began to make some sets in Fusion for the final animation. I prepared some nodes like color match, highlight glows, vignetting...to apply at the various shots.

Textured

two renders with correct textures.
the second is a reduction from a bigger render: 3500x2000 done in mental ray in 37 minutes, final gather and beauty pass. the smallest is 1024x576, the final resolution for the animation, and it was rendered in about 1:47. both compositing of ambient occlusion and color correction in photoshop

Ambient Occlusion without compositing

i don't know if someone could be interested. maybe this could be useful for the newbies in ambient occlusion or for quick render test in mental ray without final gather support.
i made this material some months ago in vray during the model of the castle. when i made render tests i didn't want to composite ambient occlusion for every frame, i just wanted a detail enhancement directly in the render test without made an ambient occlusion pass and composite all in photoshop. i made that with the vraydirt shader. in mental ray i thought that it's the same, but applying an ambient occlusion shader, faster then the vraydirt. i don't use the arch&design material that has a built in ambient occlusion option; i don't have the full control as a traditional ambient occlusion pass. this trick is also useful for quick render test without using any final gather or global illumination support, just 3 light setup; it's just fake global illumination, not rocket science.

here is the scene set


and a simple shaded and wire view of the model for the test

a render with a standard material with grey color in diffuse

for this test i assigned the same material both to the model and the ground

the mental ray ambient occlusion pass. make the tune of the ambient occlusion as usual


generally i have to composite the last 2 renders together in photoshop in multiply blend mode, but if i want blend it directly in max frame buffer without photoshop i just make a material blend with 2 materials , the grey mat and a standard black mat, and using the ambient occlusion as the blend mask.

the 2 materials used for the previous renders


the contruction of the blend material. i used the previous grey material and i added a black material to simulate occluded parts of the model and the ambient occlusion shader as the blend mask that tells where is the occluded part (black meterial) and the unoccluded part (grey material).


put the 2 materials and the mask and make a render test. if something going wrong like this

just swap the gray and black material.

here is the final render with the material correctly applied.


i can adjust the intensity of the ambient occlusion changing the upper and lower values in the mixing curve of the blend material. for the final render i use 1 for the upper value and 0 for the lower. 0 on both values is like the simple grey material without the support of the ambient occlusion, vice versa, 1 in both values will make the whole image black.

this trick avoid the use of the final gather for the global illumination, this just fake it. this is useful to avoid the photoshop composite pass.
it could be also done with a mix map in the diffuse channel of the material; there's a lot of ways to achieve the same results.
this is not like to put a simple color, or texture, in the unoccluded map slot of the ambient occlusion shader beacause that will not consider the lights influences like direct illumination and shadows. you can make a reflective, textured material as usual and at the same time give ambient occlusion on refractive and reflective surfaces.
sometimes i find it useful and quick during modeling or materials setup, but for final renders i always separate the beauty render and the ambient occlusion pass and i composite it in photoshop.

here are a quick reflective material test.
without ambient occlusion support (mixing curve: upper and lower values both set on 0)


with the ambient occlusion support (mixing curve: upper value sets on 1 and lower value sets on 0)

First animtion test

this is the actual state of the model. the interior part is done but i hide it for quick animation test. the renderer changed to mental ray, faster than vray in many cases.
at this link an high res mov (40mb)