How i spent my Summer Vacation ;D

Hello Blenderheads,

some of you might remember me from back in the days...i gotta admit that i was totally absent from forums for a while. Reason being worjk and real life getting in the way of things alot. Some of you I still met now or then via steam to chat. I havent forgot about any of you on the old forums!
Big Z, Bunny, Unhurdof etc. i'm talkin to you ;D All the BNewies intelligence squad!

Anyway just so you know..i'm still using blender..mainly for work purposes to do schematics of buildings and basicly just rapidly visulaize floor plans or stuff.
So i felt i could share some of the images  i done lately. I made up a nice pipeline to directly export my stuff from my Work data into blender and quickly render out all sorts of previews of stuff. If anyone is interested i'm always eager to share my findings:)

To give an impression how effective blender is for me ..take one of the floor plan grahics or isometrics...some of these are just 6 hours from being in the actual building to sketch measurements , over to drawing it in CAD, exporting and rendering to blender and then doing a montage in gimp. Usually i throw these in as some kind of bonus and advertisement to contractors so they will hire me to do their whole building or whatever they want to see in 3d.  

To sum this up...i owe my job to the people of the old blendernewbies forums. All of u shared so many knowledge with me, without I would have never made it this far into doing the job I want to do:)
Much love and appreciation to everyone that participates here!!


Hers some pics of the stuff i do at work.

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and then theres this less 'prestigious' projects  ;D

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thanks for watching...feedback and critique are always appreciated:)

Happy New year everyone and sorry for being absent so much...i tried to be on IRC now and then but its often empty...some of you are on my steam list so u can find me there too:)

Looks like someone hasn't been wasting his time. Glad to have you back on here.

I like your style with the ceiling-less 3D floor plans. The wire frame borders, the color selection, the shading, everything looks good.

that is so awesome that you've got a job using Blender!!!!

and neat work too!

Glad to have you "back".

Props! Way to go, man!!   

Very cool that the customer might think you've mastered drop shadows in Photoshop on the plan view, and then turns the page and gets a 3d perspective view. Nice idea!

Heya Nixon. Welcome back, and thanks for the shoutout. I'm just making it back to the site too. Glad to see you're using Blender at work. It's like getting paid to have fun, isn't it? Nice renders all around here. Hope to see more soon! Welcome back again and happy new year!

Nixon! Unhurdof! Where have you fellas been?   
It's good to see you both visit us--hope you'll be sticking around for a spell or two. I've been out for a couple of weeks... I start school after next week, so I'll be in and out myself.   

Dobi wrote:Looks like someone hasn't been wasting his time. Glad to have you back on here.

I like your style with the ceiling-less 3D floor plans. The wire frame borders, the color selection, the shading, everything looks good.

x2. They're all great but I really love the wire frame plans. Great work

BnBGobo99 wrote:Nixon!  Unhurdof!  Where have you fellas been?   
It's good to see you both visit us--hope you'll be sticking around for a spell or two.  I've been out for a couple of weeks... I start school after next week, so I'll be in and out myself.   

Heya Mike! Congrats on starting school! What will you be studying? I know school, and life keeps us pretty busy sometimes, but I hope you will find time to pop in and share. I'm interested to see the development of your short film project from Studio Greenleaf as it develops. I'll be sticking around for a bit.

Strangebloke wrote:
x2. They're all great but I really love the wire frame plans. Great work

I agree! Really glad to see not only is Nix still using Blender, but frequently at work. Good deal Nix. Very cool.

Hey thanks everyone for your kind replies:)

Awesome to see you people are still active Blenderheads too.
I browsed all the forums and obviosuly everyone has been pushing the envelope when it comes to blender ( i don't know if that is the right usage of pushing the envelope   ).

Some of you even been on frontpage of BN and such ..unfortunately i have no accounts for google+ and the like so i rarely come to drop my 2 cents

Anyway based on these isometric hints that were posted on BN some days ago i started to go over some existing buildings i made during the last years and kinda try to make a miniseries of Isometric tiles, mainly to add them to my portfolio and to communicate different styles of renderings to my architectresses.
Lots of the issues i run into with CG at work is that people lack basic understanding and proper vocabulary of 3D/ raster and vector graphics and the like ,  to transport their idea and the style they are looking for. Usually they also lack a proper computer so it boils down to me rendering stuff during the night hours and returning to office at 1pm to show what i done..definetly a suboptimal way i gotta admit.

Photorealism is actually counterproductive for architects they say, mainly because it would give the impression that the final result would look exactly like that. Bottom line is that often Architects try to avoid to be pinned down onto every exact detail. So they want someting that gives away that its a conceptual visualization. On top of that the less detailed stuff is the easier it is to alter and rerender.

Anyway heres my first tile...its just a screenshot cuz i didnt want the high res version to be at IMGUR.
I'm thinking of maybe printing some shirts of such Isometrics to wear at work:)

Comments and critique is always appreciated!
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that is great. I love it!

Hey, that's a great model (and render)! I love the look--SimCity and Civilization really should look into doing a series with this kind of style. Let us know if you do start to sell stuff. I have a former USAF friend who's got a successful business going in LA by selling his drawings on everything from shirts to a car (I have to find the car pic and post it here if he's okay with it).

architectresses

  

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Heya Nixon. I saw that isometry tutorial on Blendernation. I'm a fan of non photo realistic rendering (NPR) for many reasons, and I've gotta say you put the tutorial to very good use. It has all of the charm of some of the old school isometrical games, with an architectural flair, and a huge burst of graphical punch too. Very toony yet iconic look to it. If I didn't know any better, I might think this was for a client. Looks awesome. Nice work man. Cheers.   

Lols Dobi! Awesomesauce :Dit took me some seconds to get it   

Hey unhurdof:) hows it going for you..thanks for the comment..originally the model was made for a client just to have some guidelines for railings and other things. This building was finished 2 years ago already.
I just figured i could revisit some existing models and go over stuff i didnt do due to time constraints back then and just to polish it a bit for personal use.
Using blender always relied heavily on tutorials for me, especially with new features. It's kind of a cheapskate way to approach things but on the other hand i can use anything i can add to my CAD data in reasonable time to get a better result, instead of eventually coming up with something myself that wont exactly work that well, or doesnt get me reproducable results.
Would be great to learn some classical composition and photgraphic techniques too.

Cheers everyone!!! its the weekend in about 2-3 Hours here ;D

Heres some schematic of some water filtration pool that I made for some friend that neded it for her exams...nothin fancy and just boxes with letters...
theres also the line rendering of it that i composited in gimp.
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line render
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i revisited my dealey plaza i modeled 2 years ago and took some shots of the nicer parts of the model:)

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Holy Crap, this is sweet work! I love everything about these!
I really like how you blend between gray scale and colored regions. Something about that... I think maybe that helps turn it into it's own level of completeness as opposed to a full color render looking somewhat short on details with the lack of textures.

It leads the eye quite nicely, doesn't it?

Radialronnie wrote:I really like how you blend between gray scale and colored regions. Something about that... I think maybe that helps turn it into it's own level of completeness as opposed to a full color render looking somewhat short on details with the lack of textures.

+1

Nixon, bro, you really developped a style on your own with these. Epic work. Really loving it.

Hey thanks for your kind replies everyone, glad these work out as they do.
The 2D effects are mainly to add some visual borders and to make it less computerish.
Since i rarely ever texture something (lack of skill) i try to add a bit of detail by using line graphics that i partially erase etc. to give some contours and also to darken things a bit...
A positive side effect of keeping things simple is that it has reasonable rendering times and can be handled in foreseeable time spans. After all stuff often has deadlines and has to be economicly for both me and the architects that want pictures.

I'd certainly want more photodetail, but i have a very limited skillset in a way..and when building the scenes i forget to unwrap etc. early in the process.
So texturing when it is finished seems extremely laborious ...i usually back off then or cut corners to get around it.

In this case i just went over it to add these to my mini portfolio.

Thanks everyone for your great feedback, dont be shy to mention that these horrible mannequins suck ;D..i'd certainly remove em the next time i render. They seem sorta tacked on and dont really add alot

Nixon wrote:
Thanks everyone for your great feedback, dont be shy to mention that these horrible mannequins suck ;D..i'd certainly remove em the next time i render. They seem sorta tacked on and dont really add alot

Pssh, I think they fit the style pretty well.
You could do black silhouettes though, if you didn't like the mannequins.
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godsofart is... wow, quite the name.

oh yeah such are much better...
black or white silhouettes are also a common way of giving scale to things in archviz...one day i m gonna setup or export some from CAD...cutouts of photos that just been painted over to be black should do the trick too:)

Thanks for the hint Radial:) ..hows it going anyway?...drop by on Steam now or then ..McGuffin should be around too !!!  

Radialronnie wrote:Holy Crap, this is sweet work! I love everything about these!

+1 Wow Martin, nice work man! Daniel said it best. Niceee  

The mannequins give a good sense of overall scale of the scene, and the lack of traditional texture work is not missed either because the presentation is effective. Like you said, short render times don't hurt either. Did you use Freestyle for line rendering by chance? Very cool work man.   

Heya Unhurdof:)

u guessed exactly right...i use freestyle for all the line rendering..mainly because its awesomely quick and pretty versatile...i just keep a shadeless, transparent material in the scene and render a pass with BI just for the lines...i tone em down and erase em a bit in gimp later since they got some artifacts now or then...

freestyle is great anyway .i use it to set up perspectives with my colleagues and then render the scenes at home... cuz office pc's cant handle the cycles in most cases...
also the looks of freestyle is something that a typical CAD drawer can relate too since it looks just like any other CAD softwares line graphics...it would be nice if blender could do freestyle with vector graphics output ...one could then take it into a CAD tool and do all the dimensioning and patch this on top of the renderings again and so forth.

Thanks for your comment unhurd:) hope your doing well and that u still come to do some blender now or then!!!
*waves
  

Nixon wrote: it would be nice if blender could do freestyle with vector graphics output

No kidding...pff, I wish, lol. I love non photo realistic rendering (NPR), and yeps still Blendering, lol. Glad you are too. Hope to see more soon. Cheers, Nix.