The Architecture Academy is an online training course. You can see more about it here It will re-open to new students around April 2014, at which time there will be adding new bonuses and modules to the course.

The house exist in reel world in Canada. It is designet by  MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects  I found some plans, facades and one crossection I drew the model from.

Here i som work in progress renders.

First render. No materials yet.

The modelling of the building took about one week. Fist render with glassmaterial on windows to better see the buildning.

Here is my first render with rocks, water and materials on the building. To make the sand and groundtexture i used different textures from cgtextures and used texturepainting in Blender to mix them.

One of the hardest part to make it so it looks reel and not fake was the rocks and stone.

Also painted at watertexture. Added seaweed and trees. The trees i the only objects i didnt modeled by myself. It was from af modelpack in the academy that was allowed to use for this competiotion. All other object i  modeled specifically to this scene. The grass i made by modeling some lovpoly blades of grass, and then used the particlesystem with different settings and seeds to make it more randomly.

One of the last thing was to change the sunposition 180 degres because didnt think the ligtning was interesting enough before. I also change the rockmaterial again and texturepainted new texture.

Modeling, texturing and uwmapping: Blender
Render: Cycles 1600 samples
Pospro: Blender and Gimp

Nowadays you see many different free externel renderers for Blender. Therefore I’ve tried two external renderers and Blenders own and Cycles, which now comes in version 2.61. Not to compare them (as they are very different), but to see both strength and weaknesses as well. Looking online, you see amazing pictures, from all the renders presented, especially when the quality not only depends on renders that are used, but also the ability from those who uses them as well. Before this test, I have mostly worked on Blenders render and Yafaray. Also, I’ve come in touch with Luxrender and a bit of Cycles.

Render: Blender internal   Rendertime: 1 hour 56 min.

Render: Cycles  Rendertime: 1 hour 18 min.

Render: Yafaray  Rendertime: 2  hours 56 min

Render: Luxrender  Rendertime: 12 hours 45 min.

All images shown, have been rendered in original resolution 1500×435, and with the same studio setup. 3 mesh light or 3 area light (one on top, and one each side of the stage).

Blender internal render, it has gone to be outdated, and it is shown in the results. Sometimes  it is possible, but in general very hard to create photorealistic images. On the other hand, it works, if you on purpose, do not want the results to be photorealistic, because cheating with light and materials, is easy to preform. Generally Blender is also quite fast, and works for animations.

In the beginning, Cycles annoyed me a lot, especially the way you make the materials whit nodes. It was a completely different way, than used too, but must admit that I actually think it works pretty well. Cycles is very fast, and another advantage is of course to work with the scene, while it’s rendering. Definitely a render I will be using much in the future. The lower side to it is that it still crashes quite often, but in further developing, I am sure it will be corrected.

I really like Yafaray, and in general makes clear images. Materials are reasonably easy to set up, and you can create test renders quickly. At this stage, I am not pleased with the looks of this render, but also it can be hard to hit the right render-settings, and you will often have to correct some of them very often.

What I really like about Luxrender is that you can really get some photorealistic images. A clever thing though, would be while rendering, to correct the exposure, sensivity, fStop and ofcourse to correct on light, if you have shared the lighting up in different lighting groups. Furthermore, there are lots of other effects, such as noise reduction, lens effects and film response. On the other hand, rendertime is far from impressive. even after 12 hours there is still some noise in the image. However, there are many renderpressets which I have not tested, so with more knowledge, it would probably be possible, to cut the rendertime down.

So, which one is the best? It is hard to say, cause it all depends on which premisses you are looking at. If you make animations, Luxrender is probably not the best choice, because of the long rendertime. But if you are to create architectural interiors, Luxrender would be great, if having the time. For animations, Blender and Cycles would be preferable. For exteriors, Yafaray would be a good choice.

Here you can read news from me, what I am doing at the moment and mixed news from “blenderworld” . Right now I am trying too render my chessscene whit different renders, blenderinternal, cycles, yafaray and last luxrender. As soon as I have made the different test it will be published here.