In December last year I worked closely with Dos Architects to develop their competition entry to design a church in Lagos Nigeria.

This was an exciting project for me to be involved in concept development working closely with Dos Architects and the engineers AKT to produce something that we feel is a great result.

Today World Architecture News have published an article on the project.

It was important that although our design was quite contemporary it was still derived from traditional adn scacred features of a Catholic Church, such as incorporating a cross in the plan to form the Chancel, Transept and Nave,  and including architectural features such as a modern interpretation of the flying buttress to create aisles.

Also, it was important for us that design was easily constructed and maintained by building methods and resources local to it’s location in Lagos Nigeria.

Grasshopper and Rhino.

We developed the concept using Grasshopper and Rhino 3D, an analytical design solution that enabled us to manipulate the design real-time just by altering two lines that defined the canopy.

The structure would then be updated analytically using key parameters such as the arch spacing and aisle width. This meant that we could visualise our changes immediately without having to go back and rebuild the entire model, enabling us to get feedback over design changes much quicker than when using traditional design techniques.

This program was then developed over the project program to make more and more of the design driven by this analytical solution.

Rendering.

We felt that the interior of the church needed special attention to the quality of light. The main window features special glass of varying thickness that represents the sun, with rays emanating from the alter area. Maxwell render provided us a solution to simulate this with great effect.

Design by DOS Architects and Joshua Newman.

Illustration by Joshua Newman and Dimitar Karanikolov from meshroom.

meshroom is honoured to have been selected to have a couple of images in the new book, ‘Inspirato’ from 3DATS. No-one really knew what to expect from the book, and even some were quite tough on the team behind it on CGArchitect despite all of their hard work.

I’ve got a copy of it on my desk and not only is the work inside inspirational, but the quality of the book is superb. Well done to Brian Smith and the rest of the team that have been working on it.

Here are some of meshrooms projects that show the difference before and after our post production stage. We’re now being asked more and more to do the post production on our clients images to bring them up to scratch.

There is a lot of competition from companies offering extremely cheap services at the moment. In the middle of a recession it is very tempting for a business to look at cutting costs, and that often means choosing a cheaper supplier for some of your goods. This is no good for us, as being based in London we cannot compete with the cost of services that companies from China and Argentina are offering. In fact, it’s not uncommon for me to clear my inbox of emails from companies in far away places offering to do my work for prices that I can’t even get out of bed for.

Also, many architectural practices are turning to using people in house to do their rendering for them. These people are already on staff, and may not have much else to do anyway, and although their skills are not as good as out sourcing they’re quite acceptable considering the money they save. You just have to look through Building Design to see it flooded with low quality images that appear to have been done on the cheap.

Many of our clients are doing this, but they’re finding that often the quality is not good enough, or maybe that the visualisation company didn’t really understand what had to be done and therefore a full time employee had to spend a lot of time communicating with them to get the job done, or even that after a certain stage they refuse to make revisions to the images anymore.
This is producing an interesting effect for us, we find that more and more we are asked to fix a rendering done by another company and asked to bring it up to scratch.

We use these techniques in our everyday work, as these examples will show you. Sometimes the renderings are OK but it is in the post production that they really begin to sing.

It’s always nice to see your images published. Here is a link to the Irish Times which features an image that we at meshroom recently completed for NBBJ London. I worked with our team, in particular Dimitar Karanikolov and Nedyalko Nedyalkov, to complete the image for a design in it’s early stages for the architects NBBJ.

Article here, here and here.

I use this in conjunction with Slide Shaders which you can read about here to output the masks as layers within an exr file.

- Introduction.
- Selecting material map slots.
- Assigning the MR labeled Element shader.
- Adding the MR labeled element.
- Conclusion.

Introduction.

The labeled element shader outputs a shader tree to a render element. We’re going to combine three materials together and export them as RGB components of a image. Each channel of this image can then be used as a selection set to edit part of the final rendering in post production.

Selecting material map slots.

First, we need to add the shader to the materials we want to output.  We need to use a material slot that will export the shader but not effect our material. The slot we use is different depending on the materials characteristics.

- if the material is not refractive (ie, doesn’t have any transparency) we can use the transparency colour map slot.
- if the material is refractive, then we can use the anisotropy rotation map slot.
- if the material is refractive and anisotropic then we need to find a new slot to use!

I’m hoping that in the future we might get a ’spare’ slot in the A&D mi material to use for this purpose.

Adding the MR labeled Element shader.

We need to group our materials into threes, one for each channel in the image (RGB).

- In the first material select the slot using the procedure above and add a MR labeled shader.
- Change the shader/ map to store (passthrough) colour to pure red.
- Name the label ‘m1′

- Repeat this for the next material except for the second step change the colour to pure green.
- Repeat this one more time for the third material but change the colour to pure blue.

Now the three MR labeled shaders will have the same label ‘m1′, but they will have different colours. I’ve used the new max 2010 material explorer to help illustrate.

- make sure you have selected your render output file (this will allow max to link the output files of elements to the render output, so if you change the render output file later the elements will also update ).
- open the render dialog and add a MR labeled element on the render element tab.
- change the label of the element to the same as the MR label shader above, in this case, ‘m1′.

Now repeat this but with a new label name ‘m2′ and so on until you have created enough masks for your scene.

When you render images will be created for each MR labeled render element. These images will contain a different mask in each channel (RGB) of the image. These can then be used in photoshop or your favorite post production program for compositing your image.

You’re only limited by your memory as to how many elements you have . Of course, using many render elements can have a detrimental effect on your render times and the use of system memory.

Conclusion.

This is a very handy way of creating masks. It can be a little tricky to set-up (thinking about writing a script here…) but I really like this techniques ability to create masks at render time. By using this with slide shades (follow link at the top) you can save the elements into a 32bit exp file with the final rendering.

This is a short video showing the changes that take place during the post production of a rendering before it is finished. The renders that we create are of a very high standard, but we will usually enhance them using photoshop to get that extra touch. Many special effects such as volume lighting can be created in 3D at the cost of render time, but to add such an effect in photoshop or by using render effects and layers is very straight forward.