André Aksetøy is an Architectural Technologist and Construction Manager, with a degree from University College Nordjylland. Now he works for ARC architects in Trondheim, Norway, one of the city's biggest companies working in urban planning, architecture and interior design. The company's wide-ranging experience ranges from large residential developments, office buildings, and shopping centers toschools, kindergartens, and hotels.
Aksetøy is also one of the partners of Bimbear.com, which produces bim-objects for the building industry.
In his role at ARC Architects, he is currently working on a large-scale project in Stavanger, Norway that includes a center for elderly people, 3 apartment blocks and a hotel on the roof of a 12000m2 shopping mall.
Because the project is in detail design, cloud rendering in Revit is essential to the process. "Because cloud rendering can generate good illustrations, it makes it easier to make smart design decisions, and eliminates the need to create a second model, saving immense amounts of time," says Aksetøy.
"One challenge that usually appears when we are working on large-scale projects are the heavy project models," Aksetøy continues. "So we try to keep the model as light as possible, which means that we try to use light-weight objects with simple 3d-geometry. As a result we use more texture maps. Textures only slow the model down if you turn them on in either realistic or rendering view."
Below, Aksetøy will walk us through his design process and the techniques he used to create his photo-real renderings.
I recommend is using reflectivity maps as much as possible (fig.1). Attached you can see a typical reflection map of a parquet flooring, where the white areas will reflect light 100%, and the black will reflect 0%. I put the reflectivity map under Direct, Oblique Reflections and under Glossiness (fig.2) Because white is equal to 100% reflectivity, it’s important to tone the reflectivity maps down. Typically I tone down the brightness to between 5-20% (fig.3)
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
When it comes to the interior I like to make my own objects because I want to keep them as light as possible. Anyone who are interested in trying the objects can download them for free from www.bimbear.com (fig.4).
Figure 4
In general I like to keep the room spacious and with few interior objects. In this example I want to emphasize the artwork and the wood flooring, so I set the camera low and with the center towards the art. (fig.5)
I also like it when the crop region aligns with lines in the scene (fig 6).
Figure 6
When it comes to lighting I always render with both sun and artificial lighting to get some contrast, I try however to avoid direct sunlight through the windows to avoid too much contrast.
Figure 7
I take several test renders to make sure I’m on the right track.
I think the ability to adjust exposure online is a great feature. Usually I enhance the contrast and reduce the colors before I bring the picture into photoshop for post-processing. In fig.9 you see the raw render and in fig.10 the same picture after the adjustments.
Figure 9 - Raw render
Figure 10 - After online exposure adjustment
As for the post processing there are a few quick steps that I do in photoshop.
1: Adjust brightness/contrast, levels and saturation
2: Copy the layer to a desaturated one. It is easier to adjust the shadows and highlights when it is in black and white. Then enhance the dark areas and take a 50 % opacity on linear burn. (fig.11)
Fig. 11 – Black and white layer with 50% linear burn
3: Smart sharpen – enhances the micro contrast is a great way to improve the details. (Fig.12)
Fig.12 – Smart sharpen
4: I like to darken the whole scene except where most of the light comes in. and do a radial blur with screen overlay. It gives a sunbeam effect that I really like. (fig.13)
Fig. 13 – Radial blur gives sunbeam effect through windows.
Usually I repeat step 1 and 2 a few times until I’m satisfied.
In my experience, cloud rendering has made a big difference for presenting new ideas to the clients that was not in the original offer. It really helps convincing the client when you have a good illustration to show. One good example is a project we were working with in Trondheim. It was a 10.000 square meter shopping mall, and we felt like the space around the escalators needed some decoration. We made a couple of illustrations with cloud rendering and then tweaked it a bit with some post processing in photoshop. The client liked it and ordered it (fig.15-16).
Figure 15 - Cloud rendering and photoshop
Figure 16 - The site today
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