First of all apologies for remaining silent for so long. I’ve been a bit swamped by work and private obligations lately (not to mention my participation in Ronen Bekerman’s CityLife challenge), hence the lack of update.

Just a quick one to report that the bed image in the “à Ditte” series (see the previous post) has been accepted to the 3DTotal gallery. This is the first time an image of mine has made it there and I’m pretty proud of this considering the tough selection process that goes into picking images for this gallery. It also means I’m allows to display this coveted badge here:

Thanks 3DTotal!

Anyone who has dabbled in Archviz with a focus on interiors will have at some point come accross the work of Ditte Isager, the Danish-born and New York-based photographer. My bet is that even those of us who don’t suspect it owe at least some of their inspiration to her work, which is marked by straight lines, flat perspectives and reminiscences of classic still lives of the Dutch and Flemish old masters.

Here is an hommage to Ditte, inspired from her work on Stable Acre, a barn renovation by David Kohn Architects.

As usual, the modelling was done mainly in 3ds Max with a little help of Marvelous Designer, GrowFX and ZBrush.

Very grateful for any feedback. You can head over here to see more shots from this series.

After lots of fooling around with furniture and small pieces, here is one full-scale personal project: a 3D version of the Ewerk, a converted power station in the centre of Berlin that is now home to offices and event spaces. The original conversion was made by Hoyer Schindele Hirschmüller Architekten, Berlin.

Because of a heavy work load in the last year, this project took ages to complete. I must have worked on it on-and-off over a period of six months, mostly late at night. I could have done more on it – some views that are not shown in the final renders were maybe 90 per cent complete – but I had to move on and call it a day at some point.

I picked this building because of the wealth of materials and textures and was helped by a great deal of good reference material, both in terms of plans and in terms of textures, which were all created from actual photos of the facades and the various ground and wall surfaces.

As always, the modelling was done in 3ds Max (2012 this time) and rendered in Vray 2.1. The scene was about 5m polys (without the vegetation) and even though each view was heavily optimised, most images took just shy of 24GB to render, presumably because of the huge amount of displacement. Most images were rendered overnight on 16 cores at about 3,000 pixels wide. All modelling was mine except for the cars, which are mainly 3D-World freebies.

Perhaps one interesting fact about this series is that all images were lit only with HDR maps, plugged into a Vray Dome Light and Gamma-tweaked using my HDR workflow in order to obtain sharper shadows. There are no other lights present in the scene.

Another bit of trivia is that I used a medium format (Vray Physical) camera with a film width of 120mm, hence the rather shallow depth of field despite the wide angles.

Hope you like it – all comments and criticism much welcome.

Click on the images below to see the whole series in higher definition on Flickr.

It’s the summer and I felt like a small infedility. Here is my first half-presentable test of Maxwell. I don’t see myself dropping Vray for all the serious stuff, but I’ll definitely return to Maxwell, which I haven’t explored enough. The subtlety of the lighting/shadows is impressive and the render times, at least for simple setups like those, very acceptable.

Things have been a bit hectic lately and I’m aware that I have slightly neglected the blog. However, I have a few things in the making that should hit this space soon. In the meantime, I have remastered my Monza Loft images (originally done for the Evermotion 2011 competition), having found the source of the excessive noise in the original images. For those who are interested in these things, I solved it by lowering the AA setings quite radically and upping the brute force subdivision equally so – as a result, the image rendered in a fraction of the time and much cleaner. Having said that, I am still largely puzzled by the changes made to the DMC sampler in Vray 2.x and getting used to the changes in settings these imply. Here are the new versions:

The 2011 Evermotion competition has ended. Below my submissions to the interior section (click for full-size renders). This is a relatively slavish interpretation of Piero Lissoni’s “Loft in Monza”. It also comes complete with a quick-and-dirty animation (Vimeo link below).

This is a project I’ve struggled with enormously, essentially due to the impossibility of obtaining a noise-free image in a reasonable time frame while using brute force GI in Vray 2.0. I tried switching to Irradiance Map but it just would not capture the tiny details in the mouldings properly. Noise in Vray 2.0 is a vexing issue I need to investigate some more.

Anyway, I’m probably disqualified as I forgot to feature an “info line” in my images, as per the requirements. Not only that, but Jarry German and Jacinto Monteiro have posted far better images (and Jacinto is using my book models, which definitely speaks in his favour;-)). My money is on one of them ending first at the finish line.

Check the submission thread on Evermotion for lots of great images.

EDIT: That’s official now, my images have been disqualified. Oh well, I’ll pay more attention next time.

EDIT2: It is perhaps just as well that my images have been disqualified because I don’t think I could have measured up to the winners, who have just been announced. Head over the official competition page to get a glimpse of these fantastic images, including a stunning exterior by Jamie Holmes. Warm congrats to the winners for well-deserved awards.

Loft in Monza from Bertrand Benoit on Vimeo.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a fully formed personal project… and this is not it.

This started with the best of intentions but I could never get it quite finished, furnishing-wise. But the house itself (inspired by the Graticule House by David Jameson Architects) is pretty much how it should be, while the landscape is about 75 per cent there. Still, I doubt I’ll dig into it again, so here it is anyway.

As usual, modelled in 3ds Max and rendered in Vray. The scene was used as a test environment for GrowFX trees (all of them are) and as a display cabinet for recent furniture models, which, as always, you can grab at the usual address.

Here are a few renders and you can find the full sequence of images here.

What a day! It began with the news that the latest issue of 3D Creative, this august compendium of CG goodness, had just appeared with a front-lit kitchen image from my Tribeca Loft series (see below) featured in its gallery section.

Ok, it isn’t a two-page spread, but still, this is pretty nice (click here for a free sample of the gallery section).

Then, a little out of the blue, came this:

Now, these are coveted distinctions, but both in one day? And that’s after Ronen Bekerman and Peter Guthrie made me the honour of featuring these images in their respective blogs. I’d better prepare for a long dry spell.

Which should leave me with some time to work on the Tribeca making-of I’ve been asked to do. More on this a little later. In the meantime, warm thanks to everyone who commented on the Evermotion thread. If you want to see more images from the Tribeca series, just click on the bottle of white wine below.

It’s been a little while since I last posted images from fully-formed project. So here are two series I finished quite a while back and never really found the time to upload. Both are personal interpretations of existing buildings: Haus M, near Munich, by Titus Bernhard Architekten and residência em aldeia da serra, Brasil, by MMBB Arquitetos.
As always, the modeling was done in 3ds Max and the rendering in Vray. No special technique employed that would be worth mentioning, except perhaps that Haus M was initially developed to stress-test the Brix plugin, which I found very useful and robust, as written earlier.

Click on the images to see the entire series: