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.

I’ve been working with UK street artist Ronzo to animate his character designs for German company aka-aki mobile location networking game.

aka-aki are developing the application and got Ronzo on board to design the characters. I worked with Ronzo to develop and render the 3D for the game and also with aka-aki to produce 3d for the video. It’s great to be involved with people producing great stuff, and anyway it’s my first iphone title.

Dimitar has been hard at work capturing a typical day in the studio with time lapse photography. We’ve edited this to remove some of the boring parts (work) and more of the fun stuff (table football and a Friday after work beer).  Shot with a 5DmkII EF 16-35mm at ten second intervals.

As a modern day 3D artist I need to mix both the left and right sides of the brain. It might have seemed inconceivable twenty years ago that maths and computer coding would play such a large of modern day art and illustration.
I’ve been experimenting with papervision and 3D Flash recently, and while most action script guru’s are trying to get their heads around 3D I’m coming from the other side and blinking my weary eyes at action script. No fear, there is some progress in a straightforward application of interactivity on a architectural project that is geometrically pure, the Palace of Peace.

Here is the short aerial camera video that we (the meshroom) completed for the Foster and Partners Sofia masterplan competition this year. The job was completed in 3DStudio Max and VRay and initially rendered as still images at 8K pixels wide. We rendered them this large as they were going to be printed at an obscenely large scale. My colleague Dimitar was in Sofia when the exhibition was on and had a chance to see the final images printed out this size. The sunset image is shown at the end of the video.

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’m posting this video which was completed quite a while ago now, back during the development of the Foster Yatch.This was completed so that Yacht Plus could use it in their show at the Monaco boat show in Monte Carlo, France.

All the work was created in 3Ds Max and rendered in Vray using Dreamscape.  The post production was carried out in Combustion and the editing in Premiere. That’s enough technical jargon for now, you get the idea.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

And re-edited.

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.