All images: edelVIZ / Sun Estates Developers
EdelVIZ offers architecture and product visualisations and works remotely – the location is in the province of Goa in India. They coordinate via Skype, email and telephone, and then they get started. The pipeline is based on Modo and we wanted to know how the latest project went with it.
The company was founded in India in 2010 by Jonathan Josenhans (Dipl. Digital Artist) and Robert Patzschke (Dipl. Architect) and specialises in the German market in addition to customers from India.
DP: Goa, India? Isn’t that a bit out of the way as a business address?
edelVIZ : Outsourcing can be offered here in German and with a Western understanding of architecture – and the usual cultural misunderstandings that usually plague outsourcing projects can be avoided. Having lived in India for ten years, I am able to avoid these pitfalls and mediate between the customer in Germany and my team. But we have also built up a bit of a “German company in India” over the last few years and are trying to bring the best of both worlds together. It is a great help to buy the licences in Germany from maconcept, as many resellers in India are simply not up to speed. We often work with freelancers in Germany and are happy to step in with our team when things get a bit busy. We regularly work with partners in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg and have recently started working with a partner in South Africa. We are always interested in working with new partners here – even if we don’t appear directly.
DP: What was the project and how big was the team that managed it?
edelVIZ: For this project, five images of this luxury villa had to be created in a very short space of time – the order came in on Monday and the presentation was on Sunday of the same week. As the design for the house was only available in the form of Autocad drawings, the entire geometry of the house had to be created from scratch. We had seven artists working on the project:
- Jonathan Josenhans – Managing Director
- Aditya Surlakar – Visualisation Artist
- Mahesh Malviya – Visualisation Artist
- Prashanti Salgaonkar – Visualisation Artist
- Priyanka Viegas – Visualisation Artist
- Shara Dhargalkar – Visualisation Artist
- Siddhesh Vengurlekar – Visualisation Artist
DP: How did you get involved in the project?
edelVIZ: Sun Estates Developers in Goa is one of our regular clients and since an important potential buyer had announced himself at short notice…. We had to create 5 images within a week and it was our first project in V-Ray for Modo.
DP: What did your pipeline for this look like?
edelVIZ: We usually create our visualisations in three steps, depending on the time frame of the project, we also work on them in parallel.
Geometry creation of the house
We “cleaned up” the Autocad drawings in Draftsight. Comments and unnecessary elements were deleted, the groups dissolved and the whole thing exported as DXF. The DXF was imported into Modo and the various 2D drawings were arranged correctly in relation to each other. The modelling of the house then begins on this basis.
Creating the surroundings and vegetation
edelVIZ: Armed with the landscape architect’s open space plan and lots of photos of the property, we started to create the vegetation as accurately as possible. Modo’s replicators are very useful for this, and the distribution can be checked using vertex maps. Furniture is then distributed roughly according to the customer’s specifications.
Lighting and camera
At the start of the project, rough camera positions are defined to ensure that no areas of the house that cannot be seen later are edited. Once the geometry has been created, the lighting mood is defined for each image and lights are then set accordingly. The V-Ray Physical Camera was very useful here. In the night scenes with many lights, the renderings were achieved by limiting the light sources in V-Ray with the “Number of Probabilistic Lights”. Depending on the camera location, between 40 and 100 lights can be seen in the night scenes. We have limited the number of lights calculated per pixel to 12 in order to find a good compromise between quality and rendering time.
Compositing and finishing
edelVIZ: After the images were rendered in A4 @ 300 DPI, the post-production was done in Nuke and the images were handed over to the client.
DP: Since you are working on Modo: Which version are you using, and have you supplemented it with plug-ins and scripts? If so, which ones?
edelVIZ: Our Archviz pipeline is structured around Modo. We used V-Ray for the first time in this project. Overall, our software park is: Modo, V-Ray for Modo, Photoshop, Nuke, Photographs and a free Floormaker plug-in.
DP: And what do you use as a “pipeline tool”?
edelVIZ: Google Sheets!
DP: With the experience gained from this project, what would you like to see in the next version of Modo?
edelVIZ: Functioning referencing and, as always, better stability. Unfortunately, referencing in Modo is currently very unreliable – while Modo has generally become much more stable, complex scenes with referencing crash all the time. In addition, problems with shading always occur after a while and the scene then has to be completely reloaded. Referencing is the one area of Modo that I think needs to be improved the most.
DP: Where do you keep up to date with news about your tools between projects?
edelVIZ: We basically check Community.thefoundry.co.uk and fxguide.comevery day.
DP: What’s next on the programme for you?
edelVIZ: A stronger focus on Archviz videos – we want to try out Syflex for Modo now! The aim is to integrate more and more moving elements into the videos. Syflex will be used to simulate curtains, flags, parasols, sails etc.
DP: And finally: If you were to start the project all over again, what would you do differently?
edelVIZ: With the V-Ray knowledge we have gained, we would certainly approach the lighting and shading more efficiently. As with all other renderers, with V-Ray you also have to understand the levers with which you can achieve a good balance between render time and quality – of course it didn’t work so efficiently straight away and now we could certainly halve the render times with better settings. In addition, the workflow with Distributed Rendering and V-Ray Standalone is different to Modo.
Archive notice: This article was originally published on 2016-11-02. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
