Student Projects - Albertson's Building

Below are some of the best renders coming out of the Albertson's Building project.  It's exciting to see what students can produce in a few short weeks.  Overall the projects were very good with a handful of near perfect models of the building.  For about a two week project this is quite impressive and speaks to the power of BIM and parametric modeling as well as the dedication of the class.  While Revit isn't the solution to every architectural problem out there, it certainly is a good tool to have in the tool box. 

Most students chose to render in 3DS Max since we had covered that workflow (Revit > FBX file format) and Max is a much stronger rendering interface.

Night time render

Using my TA's very well done model of the Albertson's Building once again, we were able to generate a night time render.  This is useful for familiarizing Bryan with new techniques, practicing variations on techniques myself, and providing students with an example for a final render.

Some of the techniques used in 3DS Max:

1.  Skylights turn off ambient lights.  Place one, then turn it off and you'll be able to add lights selectively.
2.  HDR enviornment maps are nice!  Although what's seen in this image is a night time jpeg swapped out easily using a PNG source file which supports transparency and doesn't include the HDR sky we used in Max.
3.  I changed the light Kelvins to a low number, like 1800 to give a warm light on the interior.
4.  Link all lights using the 'Clone' tool so changing one changes them all.
5.  Place the MR Sun at 4 or 5 am to give a very soft ambient light.  You don't want TOTAL blackness.
6.  The warm interior light is a near complementary color to the night sky (orange\yellow to violet\purple).  This makes everyone happy!
7.  Entourage doesn't seem as called for in night time renders.  This is subjective and just my personal taste.  One figure might be nice.

Albertson's Building Rendering

After a long afternoon of critiquing projects, my TA and I sat down to work on a rendering based off of his Revit model of the Albertson's Building.  He has been following along with the students to see how long the project has taken.  His model was great and had a lot of detail, so we had a lot to work with.  We imported it into max, worked with HDRI environment maps to get a full 48 bit color, modified the sun angle to pop certain elements, swapped out all the textures for Arch + Design textures, customized the brick texture bitmap to match the real building's tone of brick, and finally did some strategic vignetting in photoshop to strengthen the overall focal point of the image.  Here is the result of our efforts.  It was about 1.5 hours start to finish.

UPDATE:  We spent 35 minutes adding entourage, a bit of context, some improved textures and reduced vignetting.  Also there is a modified crop.  These small steps make a huge difference.  Before and after:

After:

Before

Sharkhog Render

As a follow up on the last assignment that followed Zach Kron's Placeholder Family exercise, one student did a few modifications to it and then rendered it in 3DS Max with custom textures.  It's really well done and the textures are fantastic.

Joe's hedgehog render

Parametric Exercises

We're well into our Albertson's building project by this point, but I thought I would post something about the parametric and formula based work we've been doing.

Students have been assigned a few of Zach Kron's exercises from his blog: buildz.blogspot.com.  Most notably the elephant trunk and the hedgehog.  Zach is the go to location for this sort of thing in Revit.  Also, we've been referencing David Fano's work over on designreform.net.  David's tutorials are very good and make great homework.

Finally, I talked to the class this morning on how one could use these sorts of exercises to construct a flexible, 3d space frame in a project environment.  It was beyond the scope of the course, really, but I think it's good to show where you can go, even if you don't show every step needed to get there.  Below are a few pictures from recent stuff, including some work in iRay by my TA, Bryan:

My formula driven spaceframe example

iRay Renders

Joe's Sharkhog....an adaptation of Zach Kron's tutorial

Spiral Staircase + Bookcase

One student did a very nice render in 3DS Max of a couple of her latest designs.  It features her parametric bookcase (an earlier assignment), a spiral staircase and some nice texturing\lighting done in Max.  Spiral stairs are fairly do-able in Revit.  The trick is when you want it to continue the helix through multiple revolutions.  The solution is, of course, multiple stairs.  The hard part is lining up stringers\rails etc.  Anyway, here is the render!

Staircase

The final task for my students is to model the Albertson's building on campus.  It's where we have class and is readily accessible with a number of interesting architectural features.  One of the requirements the students have is to pick an area of interest and model that in intricate detail.  One of the options is a unique staircase that is supported by a series of C-Channels and has a very interesting and exposed structure.  As a test before the students start I decided to model this to see how best it could be done and also use it as a reference for students.  Here is the result: