Shanghai Expo 2010

http://poll.fm/f/1uz1n

SU plugins Render Debate- Maxwell vs Vray vs Kerkythea

Maxwell 2.0 rendertime: 33hrs

Kerkythea 2008 rendertime: 13hrs (Path Tracing)

Vray 1.6 rendertime: 5hrs (IM 5 passes+LC 5000)

This debate is all based on the render plugins for sketchup, so Max and C4D are excluded in this competition. This is not an scientific way or comparing it, as its not rendered in the same duration of time. But I try to set them as relative as possible for high quality. The material settings is the difficult one, as all these renders use different parameters. But I want to compare here is not just the quality of the output but also the workflow, flexibility, compatibility and the time of setting up the scene. I'm all new to this three programs (architecturally), so the frustration also come into account. 

Best Quality: Maxwell > Kerkythea > Vray

Best Render Speed:  Vray > Kerkythea > Maxwell
SU Compatibility: Kerkythea > Vray > Maxwell
SU Flexibility: Kerkythea> Vray >Maxwell
Interface control: Vray > Kerkythea = Maxwell
Material Settings: Maxwell >Kerkythea> Vray
One click render : Maxwell > Kerkythea > Vray

Overall: Kerkythea > Maxwell > Vray

UK Election 2010 - Graphical Debate

Liberal Democrat 

Plaid CYMRU

Labour

Conservative

SDLP

UK Election and debate is recently a hot talk, I'm not a political fan, and maybe its completely the opposite, I don't know what are the UK parties or how the politics works. Just occasional click into the BBC website where they put all the information about the parties and their manifesto. Its interesting to see how they market their proposals. There's thousands of words to read which I won't eager to do. But just simply looking into their graphical debate, I like the Liberal Democrat most, as its visually comfortable and easy to spot out the key issues. I vote them as The best layout design. The best graphics will go for Plaid, as they have very good photography and nice fonts. Conservative as its name is very conservative way of Microsoft Word layout with all text and not images, even the cover looks like a bible that I won't even want to open it. The Labour and SDLP are more or less like typical documents, not so interesting. 

Stone on Stone - ROB CARTER

Stone on Stone [CLIP] from Rob Carter on Vimeo.



ROB CARTER
Born in Worcester, UK, 1976
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
http://www.robcarter.net/

2009, 7 minutes 44 seconds 1080 x 1080 pixel digital video projection B&W/Color/Sound (Clip taken from the 3rd to 6th minute) http://www.robcarter.net/ “Stone On Stone” is a stop-motion video animation that uses the architectural language of High Gothic and Modernism to invent a contradictory history of their evolvement. The theme starts and finishes with the vast and unfinished Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC. It is contrasted with Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery in France, competed in 1960. The video uses this anomalous but single-minded architectural vision as the foundation for a new emergence of Gothic religious expression, resulting in a complete and unified fantasy cathedral – akin to the building that the Church of Saint John might have aspired to be.

The Archigram Archival Project

The Archigram Archival Project makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study. The project was run by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and made possible by the members of Archigram and their heirs, who retain copyright of all images.

Iceland Volcanic Ash

Maxwell Render

This is the result of my first testing on Maxwell Render, I remember this engine attracts my attention during my 3rd year when I was still frustrating with the Final Render which is now already intergrated in Maya. At the time I begin to use a bit of Vray and give up testing it out. The first impression is the interface looks rather complicated and doesn't makes you comfortable for first use. A lot of sub windows and technical caption flying around the settings menu. But actually it only took me like 1 or 2 hr to get familiar with it. The only complicated part is the material settings which is based on layers, blending and weight settings. The rest is straight forward. Set the location of the sun and the time and it does the rest of the job. Although there's more advance settings like turbulance, Ozone...etc. But you can ignore all these and just go for the default. The biggest problem I had is the viewport interface, its completely different than Max, Rhino, Sketchup which is confusing me. Another is the texture UV coordination which is not so intelligent, I really appreciate the Gizmo in 3dmax, simply pulling the axis to arrange the bitmap in viewport. But the really cool thing for the new Maxwell 2.0 is the multi light adjustment, with this you can trun on and off any scene lights(even the colors) anytime while render of after render, which none of the render engine can manage this, its because of using physical light parameters. Basically all u need to do is set the material and just hit render, no need to check light intensity, just adjust it afterwards. Another point of Maxwell is that it doesn't have any light object like spot or omni, and I haven;t figure out how to control the light quality by just using emmisive material, but it supports IES files which makes it even easier for the right light distribution. All above advantages still leads to his big disadvantage, the render speed. This image with SL19 (Maxwell unique passes factor) takes 16 hr and still have a lot of noise needs to be reduced.This especially happens in interior scene where all lights are indirect, not to mention this Tadao Ando's spiritual light. I have a quick check on Maxwell forum, some really decent images comes to 30hrs or more running on a 8 core 3.0Ghz server. So maybe my poor duo core  2.4Ghz for 16hr is nothing. The frustrating thing is that by searching on the forum, I found someone testing it on the same scene with nice material mapping which immediately beat my crappy image. 

Vray - IM+LC with IES lights

This should be my last test on Vray, using the best solution of interior scene, IM+LC. this time instead of using fixed sampling I uses adaptive sampling which gives faster result and sharper edges as well. The IES lights gives more realistic feeling but it doesn't support the emissive material mapping for IES files, which means u need to set up a vray light underneath an emitting object which I found its a bit complicated. Maxwell and Kerkythea both support IES mapping, so its easier to just apply it as a material on the lamp fittings. This saves a lot of time to set up when exporting models from Sketchup. Anyway, nothing is perfect. Vray best advantage is the speed and quality. Kerkythea is easy and fully support with Sketchup. Maxwell is physically accurate but really slow. C4D is very fast but doesn't have IES light. From the following test, as for sketchup user, I think Kerkythea is the easiest solution and its free especially for everyday use. Vray will recommend for the final production or for animation output.     

Vray-Progressive Path Tracing

Another rendering method that can use in Vray is called Progressive Path Tracing, it is using the light cache as calculation, each passes calculate the whole frame, so the rendering can be stopped anytime you want. Similar to Kerkythea MTL and Maxwell, the images is going better when more passes are calculated. As an result, the speed is always the problem if u want a clear image.  I know the advantages of this is the simple settings, no need to tweak the parameters like Irradiance Map does to get the right light distribution. Maybe its not a good exmaple to test the interior view with this method, but I haven't really found out the real value of using it. I think the IM+LC works much better and faster.

AntiVJ facade installation

http://www.antivj.com/songdo/index.htm

An impressive visual performance by label Anti VJ , over the facade of a recent building in thenew Songdo city, South Korea.

+Exb_Sublime Flesh