7 minute read
Design Viz
Designviz
Project Soane (projectsoane.com) challenged leading visualisation experts to bring back to life Sir John Soane’s original Bank of England, demolished in the 1920s. Stephen Holmes spoke to some of the winners to find out how they used rendering tools to create such life-like scenes.
Best Image (honourable mention)
Andrew Goodeve and Mihail Bila of Glass Canvas, UK
The Project Soane entry by London-based visualisation experts Glass Canvas imagines the Bank’s iconic Tivoli Corner much as artist Joseph Gandy, a contemporary of Sir John Soane, might have captured it.
Incorporating a composition, atmosphere and painterly feel sympathetic to Gandy’s style in his original nineteenth-century paintings of the structure, the camera is placed at a distance, capturing the building in its entirety, with neighbouring buildings and clearly defined streets evoking the urban Victorian landscape.
“As compositional rules, I used the ‘golden rectangle’ and the ‘golden spiral’, applying them to set the camera angle and later to place people and carriages in the scene,” says the project’s visualiser, Mihail Bila.
With the raw image created in 3ds Max and rendered using V-ray, the post processing followed several distinct steps.
First, daylight was accurately modelled: the only time of day when any of the two facades captured in the scene would receive direct light was calculated at around 7am.
A low sun HDRI, casting soft shadows to emphasise the beautiful neoclassical architecture, was added, along with clouds to frame and enhance the composition.
After mixing the render elements, puddles were painted onto the scene. “This can be achieved by using the RawReflection element; however, an even better way to do it is by doing a new render of the street with a highly reflective material,” explains Bila. “After the render was finished, I included it as a new layer on top of the others, made it invisible by placing a black mask on top of it and started painting puddles here and there with an oval-shaped soft brush.”
These masks ensured that layers stayed intact, even while the position of the puddles was changed in order to achieve the best effect, in terms of the atmosphere and composition of the scene.
Bila even added fine detail such as more diffused reflections at the drying edges of puddles.
Adding people to the scene was important, as in this period, this would have been a very busy, crowded area. 2D images were used, with the exception of the horse and the carriage in the foreground. With the composition complete, atmosphere, depth and realism were added, including fading colours, smoke from chimneys and dust around the wheels of the carriages.
“For this particular image, I decided to apply a subtle teal and orange effect, in order to emphasise the unique morning light and maybe evoke the dramatic colours of Gandy’s paintings,” says Bila, who, having used various colour lookups at a very low opacity level, tweaked the various layer levels.
For the final touches, the vignette effect was emphasised and exposure increased in areas in direct sunlight, making the entry as atmospherically lit as one of Gandy’s finest works and winning it a place among the competition’s top entries.
Online exclusive: design viz workflow
Mihail Bila, 3D artist at Glass Canvas, walks you through the workflow he used to create one of the striking stills for Project Soane.
tinyurl.com/soane-workflow
Best Real Time (honourable mention)
Hoare Lea CGI
As admirers of Sir John Soane’s ability to manipulate daylight within his buildings, Hoare Lea’s entry to the contest revolved around the Bank’s enormous domed skylight and clerestory windows.
“We were fascinated by his obsession with bringing natural light into spaces – and therefore decided to 3D-visualise the space in Virtual Reality to showcase, as accurately as possible, how it would look if it still existed today,” says Karam Bhamra, executive CGI designer at Hoare Lea.
The Bank’s Consols Transfer Office is shown illuminated over the winter solstice (21 December), when the sun is at its lowest point in the UK. “There is also a gorgeous change in the colour temperature of the light entering the building, where it is very warm (yellow) as the sun rises, shifting to a cool (blue) as we reach midday, and then back to the warm hues as the dusk skies arrive in the late afternoon,” says Bhamra.
When it reaches the dusk setting, the VR scene ‘switches the lights on’ to demonstrate what a modern lighting scheme at night might look like.
The bulk of the modelling was carried out in 3ds Max and rendered using V-ray in order to gain the physical accuracy of light-raytracing with photometric sources, while being geographically accurate to allow for realism in the specific solstice lighting.
Once the scene was ready, the Hoare Lea team switched to Unity 3D in order to create the VR user experience with interactive controls.
Due to the nature of the project, there was less post production involved than with a straightforward image. However, there was still some contrast tweaking and slight sharpening of details to be performed.
“We always limit the amount of postproduction work we do when it comes specifically to modifying lighting levels. So often, the architectural visualisations we come across in the industry seem to have lots of extra ‘studio-style’ light pumped into scenes to brighten them up and make sure everything is uniformly lit and clearly visible,” says Bhamra.
“But this gives a false impression of how the space would look in the real world, which to us makes no sense. Why do this, if the point of visualising the design process is to see how it’s actually going to look? The software used these days allows visualisers to enter physical properties for materials, lighting and camera set-up, so as long as the artist is skilled in using these ‘tools’, the renders can be astonishingly close to the real thing.”
In total, five people at Hoare Lea worked on the Project Soane entry in some capacity. A dedicated daylighting team, for example, carried out calculations for verification and design of the
A VR experience with the Oculus Rift
Still from the VR experience showing natural daylight at 13:15
Still from the VR experience showing artificial lighting scheme
artificial lighting scheme in evening mode.
The computer study showed the daylight factor to be 5.75%. With anything above 5% considered to be well lit, this highlights the true genius of Sir John Soane. It is this attention to detail that helped clinch Hoare Lea the overall runners-up prize in the real-time category.
Hoare Lea was also runner up in the best image category, with this rendering that emphasises the natural light from the Bank’s enormous domed skylight
Best Image (honourable mention)
Bartosz Domiczek
The entry from visualisation specialist Bartosz Domiczek emphasises the link between historic London and its presentday incarnation, merging elements of the two different times in one vibrant street scene.
Titled ‘Genius Loci’ (meaning the pervading spirit of a place), the street scene places pedestrians from both eras against a backdrop that includes Sir John Soane’s Bank of England and elements of the City’s contemporary skyline. These surroundings, meanwhile, are being captured in the scene by two photographers from the two different eras.
An architect and CG artist with over six years’ experience working in Denmark and Poland, as well as time spent freelancing around the world, Domiczek is a graduate of the Silesian University of Technologies.
This scene was built in 3ds Max and V-ray, his tools of choice, fitting into his usual workflow. “I’m accustomed to its features, along with a bunch of useful plug-ins,” he explains. “Thus, my work can proceed smoothly and I may focus on more artistic aspects.”
The lighting helps to separate the modern and retrospective parts of the scene. This is achieved by a blue-to-orange gradient of colours, and the play between the different shades, as well as the smoke.
“The light is to partially evoke the feeling of an old photography or a painting and blend this impression into a contemporary street view,” says Domiczek, adding: “I always try to achieve as much as possible in 3D. However, in this scene, I decided to use 2D people since I needed very specific ones, regarding their costumes and appearances.”
Once the scene was rendered in 3D, intricate post production was undertaken to capture the different smokes and fog. With some assistance from a colleague, typical colour correction, contrast tweaks and plays with render passes were completed, with the final image awarded an honourable mention in the Project Soane contest.
