I am very happy to present you this time a tutorial on architecture visualization by Armir Shapallo and Dimitrios Kalemis from the “PHORMIN – Architektur und Digitale Kunst” , based in Munich, Germany.

Blender is full-featured, offering a complete range of modeling, surfacing, sculpting, painting, animation, and rendering tools. The software is good enough to have produced numerous impressive short films and is in use by several professional studios.

They describe their work for a competition which was actually published several times! Interesting is the fact that they worked with a quite simple 3D Model and put in more effort in the post production with Photoshop which gave them a lot of flexbility as they describe.

We would like to present you in this tutorial the most important steps to create your digital visualization of the “Pilgrim Tower”. Here we want to set the focus rather on the creative and artistic approach than on the technical know how.

The work was created for an international creative competition “Unbuilt Visions” where the act of pilgrimage should be expressed in an architectural concept. Obviously the project is influenced by a philosophical idea and borders on utopial.

1. Uses virtual “clay” to create details models; Easy to use interface; Visit: Sculptris. Wings 3D is a brilliant open source 3D rendering and modeling tool. The interface is extremely easy to use, and you can quickly access a myriad of useful commands. It uses subdivision modeling to create smooth and realistic designs.
2. Rendering a SketchUp Model IN BLENDER! Quick and Easy Tutorial. Learn a quick way to export a SketchUp model into Blender, then use Blender to render that model! We’ll talk about exporting, importing, lighting, and rendering our scene! Do you like these SketchUp tutorials and videos?

The following examples of architecture influenced our creative design process. We looked for landscape photos and mystic locations. We decided at the very beginning that the final image most important element will be the tower, the landscape and the people.

To develop a sculptural idea of pilgrimage we collected a lot of images and photos which should stand for the athmosphere to support our creative process. The painting “La tour de Babel” from Joos II De Momper (17th century) inspired us the most starting from the early design process all the way to the final images.

Joos II De Momper (1564-1635),
Quelle: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joos_De_Momper_-_La_tour_de_Babel.JPG

We decided to use Rhino 3D for the modelling process because the tool offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating free and creative shapes and forms. We concentrated here on the building fascade, construcion and the ramps as vertical connections.

The defintion of the perspective view is quite important for the final image. Most of the time 3D artists concentrate on modelling directly with one main perspective view in mind, which is a limitation when it comes to pick a proper view at the end. We prefer to directly model the building completely to be flexible in the later project stages.

After modelling the building in Rhino 3D we use for the next phases – the visualization – Cinema 4D in combination with the render engine Vray. The following screenshots show the most relevant render settings which were defined in Cinema 4D and Vray. As you can see the settings are quite basic. We try to keep it as simple as possible when it comes to architectural visualizations for competitions simply due to the lack of time.

We chose to render the different parts of the building seperately with alpha channel and merged them later in Photoshop. This gave us a lot of flexibility to change the look of the image in Photoshop without any additional work.

We put together the single renderings in Photoshop by useing the eraser and different kind of brushes. We also played around with the opacity of the layers to test the look of the image. We found that this was a very effective way of the design process because you got instant results!

We still had a key problem: The material of the tower! Based on our design process we thought on some kind of mud-walled architecture, but it would have been too time consuming to render all the images again. So we decided to change the color and overall look in Photoshop. This was really helpful because you have a lot of flexibility in Photoshop to test and find the best color.

Obviously you have more options when it comes to materials, textures, reflections and light settings, but for our kind of building and visualization this approach in photoshop was perfect.

The location is a very important element of the complete idea and should support the sculptural character of the tower. It was hard for us to find good background images online that stood for the landscape we had in our mind. Luckily one of our friends – a photographer – supported us with some great photos he took in Albania. We only had to change minor things and recognized that these images support our idea perfectly. Big thanks therefore to Enri Canja: www.enricanaj.com

To place the tower on the right side of the image was a very conscious decision. The human eye is used to look from the left to the right side in our culture area. If an object is located at the right side it will be seen as more important which results in an more harmonious image.
Now we had the tower and the landscape which was a key element as well. The only missing part were the pilgrims! We found quite a lot of good images that could be used for our images so we used these to merge it with our scenery. With all the different kind of people the image supports a feeling of cultural diversity.

We added several more effects with the clouded sky, the mountain top, the foggy city and the blurred rotation of a crowd at the bottom of the tower. We tried to create a “human landscape” in front of the tower in combination with a surreal athmosphere.

For the final image we only made some adjustments regarding color, contrast, satturation etc.

Here you see two images that give a detailed look on two important parts of the image:

To turn an idea into an architectural visualization like this not only the technical know how is important, but even more the skill develop a strong idea. For this process we used exemplary images and a visual vision from the very beginning which helped us to create this special athosphere for an architectural concept.

Find more images of the project at our website over at:
www.phormin.de
We really hope that you like this tutorial!
The Phormin Team,
Armir Shapllo, Dimitrios Kalemis

Modelling And Simple Rendering

How to create a simple rendering with a data source using headless development and the ASP.NET Core Rendering SDK.

This walkthrough demonstrates the most common task of a Sitecore developer with the Rendering Engine SDK: creating a view that renders content from a data source item, bound to a strongly-typed model object.

This process is done using the model-bound view view type.

Modelling And Simple Render Calculator

Note

This walkthrough assumes you are using the Getting Started template with a project called MyProject.

In this example, the rendering host displays a few different field types, including text, rich text, a link, a date, and an image.

This walkthrough describes how to:

To create the JSON rendering in Sitecore:

1. In the Content Editor, create a new template called DataSourceExample under /sitecore/templates/Project/MyProject.

2. Create a new template section (the name is unimportant) and add the following fields:

   • Title: Single-line Text

   • BodyText: Rich Text

   • FeaturedImage: Image

   • PromoLink: General Link

   • ExampleDate: Date

3. On the Builder Options tab, click Standard Values and in the Title, BodyText, PromoLink, and ExampleDate fields enter default values.

4. Create a JSON rendering called DataSourceExample in /sitecore/layout/Renderings/Project/MyProject. Enter the following values:

   • Datasource Location: ./

   • Datasource Template: Select sitecore/Templates/Project/My Project/DataSourceExample

5. Add the DataSourceExample rendering to the Allowed Controls in the /sitecore/layout/Placeholder Settings/Project/MyProject/MyProject-main placeholder and click Save.

6. Open /sitecore/content/MyProject/Home in the Experience Editor and add your new rendering, including creating a data source item for it.

   Note

   Your rendering host page outputs Unknown component or a similar message, because you have not yet mapped a component to this JSON rendering in your rendering host.

7. Publish all your item changes:

   • In Content Editor, on the Publish ribbon, click the small black arrow next to the Publish icon and click Publish site.

   • In the Publish Site window, to publish your items from the Master database to the Web database, select the Smart publish radio button and click Publish.

8. You can now test the output of your new rendering:

   • In your rendering host, open the site home page.

   • Type the following into a PowerShell terminal to get the rendering host logs: docker-compose logs -f rendering

   • In the rendering host logs, view the debug output with the Layout Service response, including the component you just added:

To create a model for the view:

• In the Models folder of your rendering host, create a new class called DataSourceExampleModel:

  Note

  This class contains five properties that are automatically data bound due to their types inheriting from IField.

To create the view:

• Create a new DataSourceExample.cshtml Razor view in your rendering host project under ViewsSharedComponentsSitecoreComponent.

  Note

  This is the default search path for Model-bound views using the built-in Sitecore View Component. To simplify the registration of the view with the Rendering Engine, we recommend you name the view the same as the name of the Layout Service component (JSON rendering).

To register the model-bound view:

1. In your rendering host project's Startup.cs class, find your AddSitecoreRenderingEngine call in ConfigureServices method, and register your model-bound view:

   Note

   The extension method used here to register the model-bound view assumes the provided Layout Service component name matches the name of the Razor view file.

2. If you are using the Getting Started template, the dotnet watch process automatically compiles your changes, and you can refresh the Home page of your rendering host site to see your component output. The component header is now displayed, as well as your default content values.

   Important

   You must check your rendering host logs for any compilation errors.

To fill in the values:

Modelling And Simple Render Software

1. In the Experience Editor, open /sitecore/content/MyProject/Home .

2. Fill in values for all fields.

3. Click Save and Publish.

4. Refresh the Home page and see the headers you populated.

Modelling And Simple Render Definition

Note

Be aware of the following when you use the solution:

• A publish of the Platform project updates the running cm service.

• The running rendering service uses dotnet watch and re-compiles automatically for any changes you make. You can also run the rendering project directly from Visual Studio.