Glass Office
This work was created in a specific way. At the beginning the only goal was to train glass material for windows or structural glazing. Good overall effect of it can be reached quite easily with evening lighting. Those assumptions lead into basic light setup and of course into building type where glass should be dominant facade material.
At the beginning I prepared just one view and everything was set up for this particular camera. Building has got a orthogonal shape, where facade is covered with modular glazing with one exception. Basically I've decided to place an Office on rather small site where in the middle are sidewalks, benches and other landscaping elements. Initially the interior was only the background. However when I moved up with preparing the exterior, interior became more significant. I've decided to place an open space around the courtyard in order to hide all restrooms, social rooms and more private spaces on the other side of the building. Such function arrangement helped with impression of increasing the courtyard's area.
The whole scene was managed with 3ds Max. Main structure of the building was created using edit poly method. After a while almost all floor-slabs, ceilings and columns were ready to go. Setting up the glazing was very quickly too. However, building's form needed to be tweaked a little bit, because basic shape was too simple and kind of dull. The two modules length oriel was added to the left side. Parallely with modeling I was preparing general lighting with HDRI and IES light sources with temperature around 3000K for the interior. After making some pre-calculations I've started preparing the interior. Practically all materials shown in the scene are quite simple. Snow is just a plane turned into poly with some custom subdivision treated with V-Ray Displacement Mod. After that the scene was almost ready to bake. Visualizations were rendered with standard V-Ray settings. In Photoshop I've played with some curves, color balance and render elements on layers.
Throughout setting the outside lighting conditions as a bluish dusk sky and by using lamps with warm temperature, quite nice color contrast was achieved. It turned out that even office space can be cozy and invites us inside the building. I did not expect that a work basically treated as a material testing can evolve into something bigger that will be enjoyable with such good feedback. That's really nice.
As you can see very basic training and material testing can turn into quite complex exterior or interior scene. That's one of the things that I really like in CG.
