NGA House in digital Balsa

@Tron, yep a bit long. Though SL 15.5 was a bit more than I needed. Most likely I could have stopped it an hour or two before that without a noticeable difference. Maxwell and iRay renders are more like, "how long can afford to render?" and try to optimize of that. I just let it run for a while and stopped it there cause it looked good. At some point I would like to animate this scene so I may go in and really try to optimize the materials & emitters better figure out what SL that gets just the right amount of noise. Also I made the paper roll more of a thin SSS Mylar which takes longer to clean up. Though considering that there was no compromise in DOF, texture size, glossy reflections, SSS, displacement, or faking anything really I'm pretty happy with a few hours to render at that resolution. Throw it at a real beefy workstation with dual socket xeons and you could cut the time in half or better. I get spoiled sometimes with quick Mental Ray renders, though I have to cut corners and cheat a lot to get those down.

wowzerz that's a big render time.. but well worth it noting the accuracy of the physically lit lamp. awesome work.

@Think, thanks! @Tron, thanks. Glad you liked the reel & the breakdown. Regarding render times, the 3 final shots were rendered to SL 15.5 with Multi-light using 5 or 6 emitters along with object and mat ID passes. Render times were around 4-5 hours each @ 2200x1238. The table lamp did slow things as it is being physically lensed, no ies data used. Meaning much of the emitted light bounces around in the reflective white cone before dispersing into the scene. This adds noise. With Multi-light you could see the other emitters were cean long before the lamp. As I often end up adding grain to my mental ray renders I was very comfortable leaving what noise there was alone, so no noise or grain reduction used. Slight Diffraction aside from the AE glare. The machine I rendered on was a Core i7 920 o.c.'d to 3.2 at the time. These are relatively long render times but this type of interior shot with physically lensed fixtures and exterior light passing through SSS (frost) slows Maxwell about as much as you can. In contrast those smaller WIP images were mostly rendered in about 5-10 minutes using only an HDRI for light source. Exterior images render much faster in general. I would be curious see how iray would do, though this would not have passes and the poly count would make gpu though to use.

Very nice and clever images Samuel.

Love the style Sam. Nice reel as well. I really like the composite break-down you did for that office building. What were the render times like with maxwell (compared to mr)?.

@ Wrender - Thanks! @ notamondayfan - Thanks, and agreed on the irregular details. With the amount of time I had available for this competition I knew I had to either detail the room or focus on the balsa models "built" look. I decided on the room & tools since they occupy a large amount of the shots. Also Here are some of the WIPs which better show what details I did get into the house.

Very nicely done! All I would do is add some small imperfections to the balsa wood, pencil marks, dust, shavings, uneven gaps and so on to add to the realism. It just looks too clean to me. Deano

Clever - well done.