The Architecture Academy v1.5

After 7 months of a lot of work, The Architecture Academy v1.5 is about to start. Andrew Price just posted a teaser trailer.

Just like last time, my duties were to model furniture that will be used throughout the workshop and will be available for download so subscribers can use them in their own projects.

Together with Reynante Martinez, a fellow furniture modeler and Rob Garlington our supervisor and also plant modeler, we've made more than 100 new models and even went back to update/fix a few models from v1.0 that needed an uplift.

I hope you enjoy them.

Furniture animation from The Architecture Academy - Blender Guru

Andrew Price from Blender Guru just made a really nice animation of some of the furniture models I showed on my previous post.

Rob Garlington was the other artist that worked with me on the creation of this model pack. Some of the furniture are his and many (or all) of the trees on the pack. Some of them can be seen on his website.

Models made for The Architecture Academy - Blender Guru

Last year Andrew Price from Blender Guru, hired me to make some models for The Architecture Academy that just opened up this week.

The Architecture Academy is an online training portal packed with training videos, models and texture banks, ebooks and a forum ran by Andrew and is all related to the creation of architectural imaging.  Topics such as modeling, texturing, interior and exterior design principles, scene and cameras setup, artificial and natural lighting and setups for Blender's Cycles rendering engine will be covered.

Below are some of the models I did for this workshop and that the attendees will be able to download and use.

All of the models were done entirely in Blender and the textures were painted in Blender and Gimp. They are both open source software and really capable of doing a professional job.

Modeling and materials exercise II - Egyptian chair

I should call this more a materials and texture exercise because that is where the complexities are, the modeling was relatively simple although it was a little hard to get the proportions, I only had one picture as reference.

Modeling and rendering were all done in Blender. Photoshop was used for making the bumpmap for the side panels.

Modeling and materials exercise - Victorian Footstool

This is the result of a modeling exercise I did recently in Blender 2.6. One of my attempts was to do some organic modeling on the dragons (in my case) or gryphs from the reference image further below. I call mine dragons because there are still missing details that would make them look more like cats, such as the tail, and chest and head fur and also a little bit of the proportions on the head. Since most of the modeling I do at work are low poly for games, I wanted to try out the Blender's sculpting tools on these, and also in the cushion and the golden emblem.

The materials were all setup thru the use of material nodes. Two bitmaps for the wood texture, one for the diffuse and specular map and another for the bump map.  The cushion is using a Voronoi procedural on the bump map as well.

The original rendering was done using Cycles inside Blender with full global illumination and depth of field.  In the screenshot below you can see the basic studio setup. One infinite plane and four area lights with 2 of them contributing to the overall illumination and 2 acting more like reflection planes.

In this screenshot you can also see the complexity of the wood material. The other materials are relatively simple phong and metal setups.

Afterwards I reduced the image to 720p and did some color correction in Photoshop.

Quick test with Cycles render engine.

This is a quick and dirty test of the Turma Córmica and  Cycles. I'll try to post more details about the setup and some overall fine tunes on the meshes, materials and poses on a next post, these meshes are optimized for the game engine not a full render.

I think these guys would look great as actual mini figures.