WIP - Bavinger House

[HarpSeal1]

Hello Everyone!

Here is a architectural visualization project that is going to be a part of a VR exhibit in the University of Oklahoma's (south USA) library this September celebrating works of a local architect named Bruce Goff. Bruce Goff's Bavinger House was built in 1955 but was badly damaged by a storm in 2011. Hopefully soon I can post more screenshots of 2 other Bruce Goff works, Crystal Chapel and Prairie House. I wish I had more Unigine projects to post, but there just has not been much demand for realtime animation due to tight budgets. The VR exhibit is a donation to the University  but at least Unigine 2 has been a pleasure to use!

 

This level needs some more optimization and any tips on lighting or materials would be appreciated!

Also here is more information on the Bavinger house for those who are interested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavinger_House

[morbid]

Hello HarpSeal1,

looks good, thank you for sharing!

On 8/24/2018 at 4:08 AM, HarpSeal1 said:

This level needs some more optimization and any tips on lighting or materials would be appreciated!

I need some time to collect feedback, I'll post our artists suggestions a little bit later.

[HarpSeal1]

Excellent, the feedback will be much appreciated, thanks Morbid!

[morbid]

Thanks for the patience, we were happy to take a closer look at your work. The overall picture is really nice and promising, below you'll find our tech artist recommendations.

Scene content:

1. It's better to use at least normal maps for any relief surfaces (bricks, stones and other) or a full set of PBR textures. There're a lot of tutorials on physically based render, you can refer to any you like. We also provide material sample that could be found in Demos -> Samples -> pbr_materials.
2. albedo colors have an important role in creating "a natural look" of a rendered picture. If on corners or joints colors on are too contrast you'll get a synthetic, unconvincing image. Try to tweak albedo colors and textures. Rendering Debug -> Albedo will guide you.
3. You could achieve a better look of the stone sidewalk (or some kind of a plateau) with more detailed geometry so the borders will be less edgy (frame_008.jpg)
4. Texture tiling could be tuned. Pay attention to the stone wall (frame_007.jpg) and the ceiling. You can use a detail layer to add some irregularity (please check this: https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.7.2/content/materials/library/mesh_base/#textures_detail). Albedo buffer mentioned in the 3rd paragraph could be useful here as well.

Vegetation:

1. Have you considered using more detailed trees models? From some spots, branches look a little bit rough. 

2. Grass looks really good!

Lighting

• Haven't you tried higher voxel probe resolution? It worth trying to bake voxel probe with 0.1 unit (10cm) voxel resolution.
• Strong indoor light sources will make final image more realistic. Maybe re-baking of Voxel Probe (see above) will help. You may want to check superposition demo for interior lights configuration.
• For non-VR render setup, it's highly recommended to use screen space effects, such as SSR, SSRTGI, and others. Feel free to experiment! Our article on render could guide you: https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.7.2/editor2/settings/render_settings/
• However, if you want VR-only, screen space effects can hugely impact performance, please, keep this in mind

Other:

• White balance (Settings -> Color -> White) can be tuned depending on the scene. It's a sort of a fine-tuning and could be optional
• Some screenshots are quite darkish, you can configure adaptive exposure to avoid this in the future (Settings -> Camera Effects -> Exposure)
• By the way, we have a brand new article on VR content optimization: https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.7.2/content/vr/

Thanks again for sharing! We'd be glad to see your results!

[HarpSeal1]

Thanks Morbid and the tech artist's for the feedback! I was curious, will Unigine support tessellation again? It appears support has been removed for refactoring of the shader according to some old forum posts. Hopefully by Friday I'll have some new progress to show!

Scene Content

1. I have a few normal maps in the scene but I'll add some to other materials that lack one. Perhaps I'll turn the intensity up as well.

2. Thanks for the debug tip, I wasn't aware of the debug mode for albedo. Tweaking the albedo has proven to be difficult, so that will help.

3. I agree. There is a higher poly model used in renderings with 3DS max and Vray has extra rock models similar to that blue green glass cullet in the screenshots. The extra rock models hid the seems but they are around 56,000,000 polys. I will try instancing a few hundred to hide the seams.

4. Sounds good, I'll adjust that.

Vegetation

1. Yes, unfortunately the studio library only has extremely high poly SpeedTree models. There is the possibility to budget time for optimizing those speed tree models so we are using the unigine sample vegetation.

2. Thanks! I've adjusted the color saturation and it looks even better!

Lighting

1. That is a good idea, my current settings are much larger at 1m but it took a couple hours to bake at 1m so I'll let the bake run over night.