Title says it all

I think I am going to add trees around the back and left side as well.

Figuring out the IES lighting has been easy going online and reading others small problems solved all of mine no problem. Time is the problem now because I get to playing around with the different lights and with so much variation I should just pick a couple and play with the rest later. The image below is not the latest render, that is happening right now but I want to go to bed.

I know the lights upstairs are blown out but I promise the next one is much better. That is the plus side of playing around with the settings and using an experimental approach to understand what needs to be done. (I may get up and post the latest render when it finishes)

Edit: Told you I may get up and post the latest render :0

I love how the lighting turned out under the overhang, above the outdoor seating area.

Playing with IES lighting addon for the last couple of days and once you get the hang of how it works it is pretty cool. I did some tests with a few different lights with the results below. (Having some trouble posting with wordpress at the moment so you may have to bear with me for a few days while I figure this one out.

It seems the problem may be with my browser on my main computer. I can edit the posts just fine on the Macbook Air. So as to the above image, I picked the lamp to the right for my Pool Deck interior lighting but I wish you could change the color temp on the fly with these lamps. It takes some preview renders and when you have to pick the color temp right after the import it makes adjustments difficult. (I could always be using the addon incorrect 🙂 )

See ya

Man UV unwrapping was not cooperating last night. As I use the latest builds just about every day I think that had a lot to do with it. Need to check out the wiki for possible documentation I was missing. Everything ended up working good but some things were just not doing what I expected.

Looks like it was not a problem with any build but some new features I was misinterpreting.  This first image is of the second floor and where I had the most problems although after identifying what I had done wrong everything went smooth after that.

The next image is the beginning of part four, the interior. I did some things different from the video. In the video he gave the walls around the house the white interior material which makes these walls white inside and out. I selected all the faces and separated them from the mesh into there own object, added a solidify and added the additional material to the interior surface. Now, if I decide to move the camera angle possibly showing the sides the materials will be correct.

The big thing I did differently was the indirect lighting around the ceiling of the second floor. I created the edge loop and separated it as its own object but here I pressed ‘F’ to create one face, used the inset tool with the check box set to even and inset that face. I then deleted the inner face leaving the ledge around the periphery. When I did this I did not need to move around vertices and all edges were straight rather than angled. From then on it was solidify, add materials and everything worked perfect after that.

I know it is noisy…. 🙂

Could not get online to post anything yesterday, bummer.

I spent about an hour modeling part one of the Pool Deck from the Architecture Academy yesterday and a bit more time refining the model and my technique as opposed to Andrews. I modified the model by redistributing the deck railing posts, positioning better from a building ‘code’ point of view and added a couple of structural posts below the deck.  The posts were added below the deck because there was no way this design would pass any kind of inspection without them :).

From a modeling technique point of view I started using the ‘Enhanced 3D Cursor’ addon and snapping to edges, faces or vertices to place my objects more precisely and I found edge and vertex snapping much easier to use than face. I also took the time to correctly label all objects as I created them, or very shortly afterward. This does not add much time to the actual modeling but helps tremendously in the organization of your models, going back and doing this later is tedious.

I have come to love the Enhanced 3D Cursor addon and use of snapping as it gives me a more accurate model which is important to me being an Aerospace Manufacturing Engineer with a Architectural drafting background I like to be precise.

Finished the render of the Museum Foyer, added a little light glow and since I did render this with multiple passes to experiment with this will not be the last render you see.

The Museum Foyer is complete. I am now waiting on the final render to complete with 1000 samples at 100%, multiple material indices for some compositing affects so this is a multilayer.exr as well. While this is completing I will watch the last episode of Burn Notice (It shouldn’t be too long).

I have been having quite the time keeping a connection to the internet lately. Anybody else having these problems today as it seems a lot of sites I have been to today have been having problems. Well, I added a few details and understand why some people tend to tweak with things after a project is done. I keep playing around with different things before I have decided to go to be and finish up tomorrow. Promise I will not tweak anymore (Ya, right).

Added some track lighting