Vuurtoreneiland

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Hi,

Happy to share my latest personal work with you! The main goal was to test my new pc-config and figure out what it is capable of. Also I wanted to bring my quality of renders and storytelling to a new level.

The main idea came up a year ago. For the first time I heard of an amazing place near Amsterdam wich is called “Vuurtoreneiland”; one of the fortresses, part of the “Stelling of Amsterdam”. It’s a an element in the rich history of The Netherlands you can look up if interested. The island, with big overgrown bunkers, nowadays is transformed into a semi-public area and restaurant. You can travel there with reservation to have dinner in one of the bunkers or at the temporary summer-restaurant.

Originally the idea was to visualize the summer-restaurant. Later my idea shifted to the lighthouse that is not used anymore. Eventually I came up with a story to tell and visualize.

With the main objects, Island and Lighthouse, I decided the mood I wanted to achieve. Very fast I came up with the idea of challenging myself with a very dramatic scene. Some reference images where collected wich gave me a good hold for colors, contrast, etc.

My inspiration for composition came form several painters in the style “Haagse- en Amsterdamse” school and “Modern Realisme”. I looked up some books and discovered a main painting-theme “iceviews” and tried to understand composition and lighting. Not by change most of the paintings where build up in the same way. Low and visible horizon, camera just above eye-level, main object on the right and secondary object on the left. At this point I made an one hour sketch to translate this information to my own composition. The secondary object on the left was pretty easy to imagine. With a lot of ice and ice-skating people it was obvious to implement a “Kook en Zopie” If you are Dutch you will understand 😉

So, the modeling started. The island has a height-variation of approx 2-3 meter wich I had to make visible. I tried some different things but eventually the island was made up out of point-cloud data. Trimming of all the excess everything was converted to a mesh in the open-source CloudCompare. For the surrounding area I used another data-set by QGis and converted everything needed to a spline-drawing. Then I started modeling the Lighthouse and ” Koek en Zopie” wich was not too hard.

The composition was already set. I added some HDRI’s for lighting and background untill I found the perfect one I needed. Materials where made up pretty basic. Some overlays where used for rusted and scratched surfaces and lettering. The ice was the most important material. From this point I decided to make everything more dramatic by imagining the place as abandoned wich made it pretty interesting. I did not want any people to add and translated this into the ice that starts to melt. Ice-floats where added using the Voronoi-breakup plugin and some snow was added. All the planting are made up with Forest-pack and plants form Archmodels bundles.

The image was rendered and ready for post-production.

If needed and wanted I would like to share the more detailed making of for this image. Let me know!
In the end I’m pretty pleased with the final result. Brought my skills to a higher level and most important discovered new methods.

Also I would like to continue personal projects with this image as a first one of a series. All with the same coherent idea of translating old paintings into modern contemporary images with my own personal twist!

Hope you like it! Thanks for reading:)

“The New Barn” – Full CG Showcase

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Richard and where inspired by Dorte Mandrup´s “Barn” and needed a 3d showcase for potencial clients to show VR, AR and full CG rendering.
Richard created the architecture and we planed the shape of the landscape.
Than it was about one week of texturing, lighting, scattering, painting, populating and finetuning.
The final shots are rendered in 6k, about 8hrs of rendertime.

Farnsworth House – Full CG Showcase

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Full CG – Showcase I made, after I saw the beautiful nature during a hike in Schweden.
The picture at the buttom shows the original foto I made for inspiration. I thought about, which architecture could be interesting in this setting and decided for “Mies van de Rohe´s” Farnsworth House.

For plans and Details of many architectual classics, see the Book: “Key buildings of the 20th century” incl. 3d Data.

Farnsworth House – architecture build from original plans by Mies van de Rohe

The Clifton Vault

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Project Summary

Clifton Vault is a state-of-the-art automated parking solution with a full concierge service located along the Atlantic Seaboard in Cape Town, South Africa. Clifton is at the heart of luxury real estate and living. The concierge service fits perfectly into an environment where finding a safe parking spot is often impossible, and it is accessible all with the push of a button. Clifton Vault’s coffee shop and a boutique hotel proposed to perch on top of the car park, showcasing panoramic views across the Atlantic, are anticipated to become popular hubs of Clifton.

ThinkLab’s full brand design and visualization solution included name generation, logo design, brand identity, print and digital brochure design, CGI’s and an animated sales video packaged to illustrate Land Equity’s concept and design to prospective buyers.

What made the project so interesting is that it is currently the only parking solution of its kind in Southern Africa, making it a complete marvel nestled within one of Cape Town’s most beautiful coastal locations. This was a full collaboration with the world’s most advanced and innovative parking system suppliers and will be fully functional from the touch of a button.

Challenges

We had a fair number of challenges to overcome like any other architectural visualization project. One of the biggest hurdles we faced was integrating the real-life footage with our animated footage because there was were so many moving elements in each scene. We adapted by carefully curating our animation movements to flow naturally alongside the contextual visuals.

We had to accommodate for design and architectural processes as well throughout our project which made it particularly difficult to produce good quality content in the time frame we were given. We adapted by pre-empting most of those changes and making our adjustments accordingly ahead of time.

Producing visuals to the highest quality standard required detailed modelling of the parking systems we had no prior knowledge of. We were able to address this challenge by doing thorough research and educating ourselves as a studio on how such systems work.

Lesson Learned

This was one of our first attempts to fully implement Corona Renderer to our workflow. We learnt a lot about the potential it has, and how it is busy shaping our industry for the better. We realize that Corona is perfect for animation as our render times were much better in relation to Vray and we had zero flickering in our final passes of this project which created a crispness to all our visuals.

In all, this project resulted in our team gaining vital new knowledge and we completed a project that was well executed and received very well by our client. Clifton Vault was a huge success for the ThinkLab team and raised the quality standards for our growing company.

Thank you

Villa Sunnano

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Hi everyone
Finally, after more than one year of working in my free time , I finished my personal animation. This is Sunnano which is a full CG animation. I tried to make it the best work I’ve done so far.
I got the idea from a villa named Sunnano which is located by the side of a lake in Sweden. This place helped me to create some different scenes and atmosphere by light and weather.
I tried to make dynamic weather during the animation, from cloudy to rainy. I also made different lighting from morning to evening to create a better feeling for the audience.
I started modeling with 3D Studio Max and used Zbrush to add some details. I used V-ray engine for lighting, shading, and rendering. Furthermore, I used Photoshop and Mari for texturing. All the effects such as fire, smoke, sea waves were made using Phoenix and finally, I used Nuke to do composition and Premiere for editing.
Last but not least, I am grateful of my wife, my family and friends for their support.
Software:
3dsmax, V-ray, Forest pro, Growfx, Mari, Marvelous, Frost MX, Phoenix fd, Nuke, Ps, Zbrush, Quixel

aminph.com
amin3d1990@gmail.com