"The House" Animation, Stills and "Making-Of" by Atelier York

Derek W said:
I take it you did the whole model in 3D Studio Max rather than autocad? Cos something that I've found is when i do a model in CAD and furnish it when i import it into 3DS Max half of the objects dont get imported cos there are 'too many vertexes' and the object is removed. Never really done a model purely in 3DS before :(
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I would recon so, most likely modelled up from an imported 2D CAD plan.
 
I have to say although the rendering and tech side is extremely impressive I find the actual outcome less so, the camera shots seem very artificial, they lack fluidity and some of the cuts are downright bizarre, the other thing is the render gives me almost no feel for the layout of the house at all somehow. It's a very impressive showcase of the technology but I'm not sure about the results as a standalone entity...
 
ichabod crane said:
I would recon so, most likely modelled up from an imported 2D CAD plan.
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Thats something thats completely alien to me cos any of the 3DS stuff I've done is all self taught as we didn't use it as part of my uni course so drawing something to scale in 3DS i wouldn't have a clue how to do. I just use CAD to start with then apply textures and animation in 3DS. But as i said its been years since i last used it so I'll need to learn it all again! :p
 
bigredshark said:
I have to say although the rendering and tech side is extremely impressive I find the actual outcome less so, the camera shots seem very artificial, they lack fluidity and some of the cuts are downright bizarre, the other thing is the render gives me almost no feel for the layout of the house at all somehow. It's a very impressive showcase of the technology but I'm not sure about the results as a standalone entity...
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You have to bear in mind that the clip in the link is only a fraction of the whole showreel for the client so yes it will seem a bit disjointed. Overall it will give potential clients a flavour of what they can do and possibly lead to future commissions.
 
Derek W said:
You have to bear in mind that the clip in the link is only a fraction of the whole showreel for the client so yes it will seem a bit disjointed. Overall it will give potential clients a flavour of what they can do and possibly lead to future commissions.
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Not with a 4 year turn around they wont :p (yes I cant get over the time taken)
 
Hi guys!

Thanks for the feedback!

I'll try to answer your questions:

1) Over the four years, we produced over 40 interior stills, 2 fly-arounds, 6 planning shots (to help get it through planning) and the two 7.5mins animations. So the actual animations were completed from start to finish in around 1.5 years, which is normal for something of that length and complexity from a relatively small studio.

2) We brought in the 2D CAD plans which had been cleaned up in Autocad, into max, and modeled directly in max.

3) as I mentioned earlier, this video that's online here is not the version sent to the client. The versions sent to them are much more fluid and show the paths from A to B much more clearly. We obviously couldn't have a 15 minute reel for people to watch publicly, so we edited it down to our favourite shots, hence why it's quite disjointed. It's more of a demo of the studio's work rather than a "film" piece as such. I go into detail on this in the "making-of" if you'd like to know more.

4) It was due to go on-site next month (so 6 years from initial design to going on-site - fairly standard for such a huge residential project), but the client has decided to buy the adjacent site and develop on it. So the project is on hold at the moment. We're in talks to visualise the new spaces should they go ahead.

Cheers and thanks again for your feedback fellas, much appreciated :)
 
Don't suppose you can say how much the house will be worth when its built?

Incredible by the way!
 
been looking at a few of my projects from my last work. Tempted to knock up a model of the castle i worked on :D
 
Derek W said:
been looking at a few of my projects from my last work. Tempted to knock up a model of the castle i worked on :D
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It's always nice finding old models on your drives and then having time to look at them again, fresh. I've just done that this weekend with a job that went south after a non-paying client, so I've grabbed the model and started doing what I was hoping to do with it 3 years ago. It's actually turned out quite well. And obviously it saves you a lot of modeling time!

I think if you're the sort of person who just likes to make images quickly and intuitively, it's best to grab an existing model and start lighting/texturing and get something out quickly to work from, rather than spending weeks or months on the modeling details and never actually rendering the thing. The pushpullbar forums are full of free-to-use 3d models of buildings and is a great place to start for anyone wanting to have a go :)
 
Very cool!

Obviously they were rendered on a render farm, but out of interest how long do you think it would take to render one of your still images on a normal desktop?
 
Thanks Klo :)

It was mostly rendered on a farm but some of the shots were done in-house. Some took 20 mins, some took almost 2 hours. This is on an i7 970 @ stock with 12gb ram. Very high render settings of course.
 
Wow, very nice.
Just reading your "making of", and.. your strip lights, are they self illuminated with the cutout gradient? I could have sworn that didn't work last time I tried it?!

Also, no idea if it helps you: you mentioned you can't use AO near those fake strip light planes - if you use the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion shader in your diffuse slot, rather than the one built into A&D you can exclude by object ID. So you'd assign a unique ID# to your light planes, so you can exclude those from the AO.


Nice to see more and more nice work with Mental Ray :)
 
Cheers!

That's actually the most useful response to this project I've had across all the forums it's been on! Will definitely give that a go. And yes, most of them were done using Self-Illum + gradient map in cutout slot. Works fine here. Just need to check your light levels maybe.

Cheers!
 
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