Hallo. I am Alex, TD of EVE Images.
Although we are not that well known at the moment, we are a big berlin based studio that specialized in archvis for norwegian and german clients. As we are 50 People+ and we are even opening a new office in budapest. I have a lot to do to keep 3D related technical issues under control and also deciding for new ways/workflows and implementing them in our pipeline. I am currently working on a system that will be able to enable even a beginner level artist to produce a consistant quality output of images and to speed up the the time to get there for all the others. It will be called Lumière and in this thread I would like to give an inside in its development, a little inside to EVE's Pipeline Development.
I will try to update this thread regularly in every one or two weeks to show the steps that have happend. Of course this will not be a Tutorial on how to exactly reproduce our workflow though. Still I hope this can be interesting for some people and thatswhy I decided to post this in the Corona Goodies Thread. (it will depend heavily on Corona :-) )
In this first episode I would like to give you a little introduction of what we used to do in the past, what the concequences were and why and how we still want to improve on what we already have.
About 1.5 Years ago (about the same time ago where we decided to switch over our production from VRay to Corona) our CD and Boss was not very happy with the look of our Exterior images any more. At this point we all agreed on that an HDRI based lighting solution will be much better but also this would mean, that everyone needed to not only go through all HDRI's in our Library every time but also need it to setup, testrender and most importantly: carefully rotate it into position. As we need to often be very precise regarding the real sun angle on a given location, setting up an HDRI environment to this level can be very challenging, espeacially in heavy scenes. So I wrote the first version of Lumière. this is how it looked like:
you can select between hdri's here with Previews and use it like a normal targetlight. Rotating around the target will automaticly rotate the hdri. rising and lowering the sun will change the angle values and better fitting HDRI's will be suggested to the user. you can label it, have different ones in the scenes where you can switch between and so on. Our Artists/CD and Boss liked it a lot as it was now super easy to get to a good result fast. I added around 25 hdri presets that rendered good and as you can see it even had backwards VRay compatibility (inverse gamma)
This was good until we slowly realized that using HDRI's from different sources did not pay out completely. We dont know the correct exposure the HDRI needs to be used at to be at a physical scale and the same goes for other parameters as well (like white balance for example). So the next big thing will be: Shooting our own HDRI's based on a controlled workflow with parameters we set. This Rig will also be rewritten as well and to make everything perfect: I will write a camera that will only be able to setup physical based values (based on camera and lens setup out of a library) with autofocus (viewport click), shutter prio/ aperture prio, different presets and so on.... (keep in mind: this is super early alpha)
And also a Light based on the Corona light with some simple Presets for light sources including correct power and Kelvin values.
At the end the user will just drop in an HDRI, turn it like they like it, put in a camera that is setup correctly,pick fokus... and If the light changes to night: every artifical light source will be correct in scale as well...
It would be nice to hear from you If you are interested in this 'making of'.