Peter Sanitra was born in Slovakia in 1980 and now lives in Milan. Describing himself as a “3D generalist”, he mostly enjoys lighting, rendering and postproduction. Peter recently finished his demo reel which can be seen on his personal website www.psanitra.com.
I fell in love with Maxwell Render straight after I saw the first alpha images. I really like the realistic approach to the lighting and materials, which is very important to give architectural visualizations a good look. You can get really stunning lighting with a minimum number of emitters, using the Multilight option, or just using sun and physical sky. With Maxwell Render I can also setup the shading very fast with the material presets.
The images you see here were rendered about one year ago on a single core P4 with 1GB Ram, so it was pretty tough.
I generally use 3ds Max for 3D work and Photoshop for postproduction. In all my models I work in real scale. It makes life easier and you get physically more correct results. Usually I render the final image on double resolution and then I re-scale to half for the final presentation. This way you reduce noise and smooth the aliasing on the edges.
For the visualization of “the Bar” I used several emitters. The main one was located behind the bottles. It has a white color with glow effect done in postproduction. Other emitters are located under the bar top with a yellow/orange color to give a bit of a warm feeling. For the ceiling light I have used a slower, but more realistic approach. The light was not coming from a simple plane emitter, but from an open half-sphere with the emitter inside, so that the light was not direct light but bounced .This way you can get some softer shadows even when the emitter is really small.
To light the scene with the stairs I have used only physical sky with sun. I like to play with physical sky, change the position and time. Usually I am looking for some interesting directions of the light and shadows to see how they affect the mood of the image. The modeling of this scene was very easy. I started with simple boxes and then added the stairs from 3ds Max and changed them to fit my space. When I was sure about the lighting, I added the rest of the objects. I have only used four textures, two of them for the wood, one for the wall, and one for the picture of the girl. The rest of the materials were just simple colors with different values of reflection intensity.
For the last scene, the Smith Residence, I wanted to do an evening exterior scene with nice warm lighting. Obviously, the lighting was the most important aspect for this scene. First I did the set-up of the block for building with three different floor levels and holes for the windows and doors. To keep the coloring uniform, I used the same emitter temperatures, just with different sizes. I also used physical sky to get some kind of sky illumination. It was pretty slow to render, mostly because of the large number of emitters, around 50. So the render time was more than 24 hours for a 2k resolution. With these long render times it is a great help that Maxwell can render as a stand alone application with separate threads, so usually I set it to low priority and continue to work on modeling and texturing while rendering. For postproduction I used Adobe Photoshop. The trees were added, together with some small changes to coloring and some noise reduction.
Many thanks to Peter Sanitra for his generous contribution |
