Tag: anna arsiriy

Final Presentation: Final Rendered Walkthrough Animation and Still Lives

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

I completed an interior design of a 2-story house which is as much functional and convenient, as aesthetically pleasing and also represents optimization of space. I created floor plans of an entire house in AutoCAD 2017, made sketches of different rooms in SketchUp Pro 2018, and modeled the final product of an interior space of the kitchen/dining/living area in 3Ds Max 2018.

The project took an entire semester. Not only I learned how to use these multiple softwares, but also learned a lot about interior design concepts in general. The project is described step-by-step in my previous blog posts.

The RAM sequence created and saved through 3Ds Max actually was not of the best quality so I uploaded an image sequence in Premier Pro and added the title text. The final rendered animation is presented in YouTube and takes 28 seconds. Please make sure you set up a max video quality of 720p. Otherwise, by default YouTube makes it a very poor quality animation.

 

These are the still lives (photo realistic renderings) of my final scene which present different lighting (also rendered at different quality and using different render engines).

  1. Daylight. Autodesk Raytracer. 3000 x 2000 px

2. Night time. Autodesk Raytracer. Some lights are on. 1280 × 720 px

3. Night time. Autodesk Raytracer. All lights are on. 3000 x 2000 px

4. Draft quality night time image. Quicksilver Hardware Renderer. 256 iterations. 1920 × 1080 px

 

Final Interior Design Still Lives – Night Time Scene (Photo Realistic ART Renderings in 3Ds Max 2018)

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

These are the photo realistic 3000×2000 px rendered images of my scene produced in ART renderer at about 25-32 dB quality. The daylight is off and all scene lights are off which creates night time scene.

The Kitchen.

Resolution: 3000×2000 (render time was about 11 hours)

Living/Dining Area/View from the Kitchen Island

 

Partial Top View 

 

TV Wall Unit with all backlights on

 

 

A little bit about the process…

I was glad to see that 3Ds Max provides an estimated render time which Maya does not do for some reason.

Another cool thing about ART renderer (my experience in Maya with Mental Ray did not have this option) is that I can set the quality to a higher value, and still manually stop the rendering at any given time, once I feel I have reached a reasonable quality output. The reason why I think it’s important to do so is because our eye does not percept the difference between 32dB and 100dB quality rendered image (at least not in frames of this project since I don’t have that many highly reflective surfaces, a lot of multi-layer materials, and other super complicated stuff).

 

Here is the Estimated Render Time of 3000×2000 image at 100dB which is the Max Render Quality – 835 hours 30 min!!!!! (Which is almost 35 days in a row!) OMG! What else can I say.

 

I rendered this scene for about 11 hours and noticed that the quality of an image has not been really changing after about 5-7 hours (when the quality is reached at about 28-30dB).

Therefore, it’s important to set an automatic stop based on a time frame or a number of calculated iterations if and when the target quality is not attained. Or just stop it manually whenever you feel like it.

There was another quality setting based on the Rendering method: Fast Path Tracing and Advanced Path Tracing. I guess Advanced Path Tracing does a better job but it certainly takes longer render times. For my project, there is no need in Advanced Path Tracing so I go with the default Fast Path Tracing method.

Also, ART Renderer includes a Noise Filtering option to minimize grain. But I was taught by the numerous internet tutorials that I should not set it high otherwise I may lose the important details in the scene because the program may recognize it as noise as well. So I stuck with 20% noise filtering.

Stop the Violence – Sculpture Class Final Project

Anna ArsiriyART 230


This is the presentation for my Sculpture class final project. For this project, I’ve used mine and my husband’s own hands to produce all the images, videos, and finally to create a plaster hands cast (using Alja Safe Starter kit) covered in bronze-like metallic acrylic coats.

The project represents hands of two individuals one of which (male hand) is an abuser and another (female hand) is a victim of a domestic violence. It is based on incredible bronze sculptures by Bruce Nauman’s works such as Fifteen Pairs of Hands and Hand Circle.

 

Click Here to See the Video Presentation in YouTube

The video is made in Premier Pro CC 2017 and exported through Media Encoder CC 2017.

 

Applying Materials in 3Ds Max 2018

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

The project is slowly coming to an end. By the way, I switched the version of 3ds Max I’m using from 2017 to 2018. I’ve learned how to use Slate Material Editor in 3Ds Max including not only how to apply different materials to my project scene objects but also how to create new materials, use bitmaps, bump maps, displacement maps, 3Ds Max material library, etc.

Applying bitmaps and bump maps to the apples and bowl

 

brick wall rendering – draft quality of 29.3dB

 

The slideshow of the current progress is also shown below:

Week 11 Presentation – Modern Home: Conceptual Approach in 3Ds Max

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

Click Here to See the Presentation in Google Slides

Click Here to Download the Presentation in Power Point

 

Plan for real life

This diagram shows that in the interior design process, “Space planning comes first”. No matter how many cool ideas and inspirational pictures you have in mind, you have to plan it.

As I mentioned in my previous presentation, project begins with an assessment of a room’s functional deficiencies and how the elements can be manipulated to better fit the people who live there.

“What do you need in your space and how do you move through your life everyday?”

Only after a lot of planning you can start doing sketches. For me, the best sketching tool was SketchUP. After many sketches have been done I went ahead to work on a final product using 3Ds Max.

 

From SketchUP to 3Ds Max

SketchUp is a great tool for visualizing the project. Instead of drawing on paper (even though I did sketch on paper a lot) you draw in this easy-to-learn software. It’s cost effective and easy to understand. However, You cannot professional 3D renderings in SketchUP.

3Ds Max is a professional software widely used in present architecture market. All interior designers nowadays should have some 3Ds Max skills under their belts.

3Ds Max vs Maya

For the most part, Maya has been known to be a much more powerful application when it comes to animation, with a huge library of animation tools, and for the most part the exact same animation could be accomplished in either application, but when it comes to ease of use, and the amount of tools available, Maya is the stronger of the two.

3ds Max has a very robust modeling toolset with a huge library of different modifiers which can make the modeling process easier. Depending on how new you are to the world of 3D then modeling in 3ds Max can be a little easier to grasp. If you’re familiar with the Booleon operation, 3ds Max is also known to work much easier and smoothly than in Maya. If you’re going to get into the architectural visualization like interiors and buildings, 3ds Max is your choice.

 

Screenshot slides:

  1. Creating floor plans (made by extruding the walls and then cutting holes for doors and windows using Boolean compound object)
  2. Two types of modeling:
  • Polygon (chair): I created a cylinder and shaped it using different tools
  • NURBs (stairs): I made a spline (or a curve), then extruded it along a certain axes and then duplicated each step using an “array” tool
  1. Combining into a major scene:

Two types of referencing objects:

  • XRef object referencing (briefly, it’s a type of referencing when you don’t copy the object but reference it from the other file. Good thing – no additional memory is used. BUT it didn’t work for me because my computer kept crushing so I used the second method)
  • Merging scenes (object becomes a part of the scene we’re currently in)

P.S. Just like in Maya, learning how to use Scene Explorer, in other words hierarchies and groups in 3Ds Max is also very important.

  1. Lights

– The purpose of photometric lighting is to expect that the rendering that you receive will look more or less like it would in the real world. Photometric lighting actually gives us a lot more power and control and we’ll end up with more believable renderings.

– Creating sun and sky. Not only it gives the option of creating a perfectly clear sunny day outside which creates a natural day lighting. But it only has an option of setting up the location on Earth. For example, we can set up that the scene is located in Philadelphia, its April 3rd, and its about 10am. And when I change these values, like if I go to a different month, that’s going to change where the sun is. So in January at 10 a.m., the sun is gonna be in different spot . But you can bring this back to April, and the sun’s gonna be a different location.

– ART renderer – Autodesk Ray Tracer is a physically based renderer which is already installed in 3Ds Max. Rule with ART renderer: you can’t do anything that doesn’t exist in the real world. It has to have volume to lights. For example, in order to have some soft shadows, light has to have some physical volume (sphere) and size (radius).

Intensity: 1000.0 cd

Color: Kelvin 3600.0

Shape/Area Shadows – Sphere (makes soft shadows and distributes light equally comparing for ex with point light) with Radius of 2’0.0”

Environmnent and Effects:

Exposure Value: 6.000 EV

White Balance: Temperature 3600.00 kelvin

Image Control

Highlights: 0.05

Midtones: 0.50

Shadows: 0.00

Modeling Progress and Creating Photometric Lights

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

The purpose of photometric lighting is to expect that the rendering that you receive will look more or less like it would in the real world. Photometric lighting is the first type of lighting I’m learning, and according to lynda.com tutorials it actually gives us a lot more power and control and we’ll end up with more believable renderings.

These are my first attempts of embedding photometric lights (standard spherical free light) into the lamps I have above the kitchen island and rendering using the default 3Ds Max Scanline renderer.

First Steps in 3Ds Max 2017 – Polygon Modeling

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

I’m happy to realize that I’ve made some progress learning 3Ds Max and working on the first steps of my interior design project.

So far, I made the first floor plan by extruding the walls and then cut holes for doors and windows using Boolean compound object.

Now, let’s go little deeper into the process. Before actually cutting these holes, I need to make polygons “legal” (in 3DS Max polygons are not supposed to have nested holes in them and are supposed to have only 4 sides without any weird surfaces and faces) by adding new edges with the Cut tool and correcting topology with QuickSlice tool.  So, the polygon mesh has to be clean!

 

After these steps have been done, I go ahead and prepare Boolean subtraction operands (an operand is an object that participates in a Boolean operation) which in this case are boxes that cut holes in those walls for doors and windows.

After a lot of prep steps have been done (very important not to skip anything) I am ready to cut these holes with Booleans with just one step. But again, we need to make sure all boxes are converted to Editable polies (by converting one box and attaching all other ones to it). Then, we create Boolean compound object, click on Add Operands and under Operand Parameters choose Substract. Boom!

After boolean is done, it’s aways better to save as a new file and give it a new name in case I want to go back and edit the object in the future. Then, I convert an entire floor plan to the Editable Poly (which makes the boolean permanent) and save again as a finished product.

Now I can finally go ahead and add doors and windows.

Living Room & Kitchen: Two Spaces Become One

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

The living room is perhaps one of the most important rooms in our homes. A lot of modern houses nowadays follow the idea of making a living room combined with the kitchen and dining area.

Firstly, the undeniable advantage of kitchen combined with a living room is space for the expansion of the usual meeting of households at the dinner table. Second, a living room gets much more daylight thanks to the kitchen windows. Third, while cooking at the kitchen, a mom, for example, is always free to communicate with other family members who are constantly in the field of view. Fourth, it is much easier to host large parties or family gatherings. And last but not least, in combination with the successful design the unity of kitchen and living room would substantially transform the interior, fill apartment with comfort, and contribute to its functionality.

Below is the slideshow of screenshots of the living room combined with the dining area model made in SketchUp. (Please note the walls and furniture are white which means that color or texture is undefined as of now).

 

After combining the kitchen I made before with this model of the living room space, we get the final sketch. Below is the gallery of the final combo screenshots.