Thursday, April 12, 2012

Content via Revit Furniture

Revit Furniture is another venture focused on making Revit content. They recently wrote to me offering some tips to getting quality renderings. One of the tips involves using higher quality entourage and furniture...surprised? Nah, I didn't think so. Here's the tips:
  • Camera location – You will notice that in professional design magazines most interior shots are taken at an angle from one corner of the room to the other corner. This makes the space look grand and shows as much of the room as possible.
  • Lighting – Photographers call the first and last four hours of the sunlight the golden hours. This is because light is softer (more diffuse), warmer in hue, and casts longer shadows. Be sure to adjust your sunlight to the appropriate time in order to make your images shine.
  • Entourage - Renderings with boring, unrealistic or minimal furniture/entourage can come across as unprofessional, plain, and uninspiring. Use entourage to tell a story and liven up your image. High quality furniture and entourage can instantly add value to your space, and make the rendering look more realistic, attractive, and inspiring.
  • Photoshop – After exporting your image bring the file into Photoshop for some final adjustments. Play with individual adjustment to find the best setting. Sometimes the default setting is the best. The adjustment you need to tweak with are: Brightness/Contrast, Auto Contrast, Auto Levels, and Curves. Play with each one of these located under Image > Adjustments to fit to your liking and aesthetic. Another hint – ALWAYS Photoshop people into your renderings!
Someone once told me that all good renderings are taken from about knee level looking up. Agree? I'm not sure any such claim as "all anything" is reliable. I do know that a fair number of compelling images I've seen since do seem to be from lower than eye level. As for the Entourage focus, a sure give away that a image is a rendering is the lack of messiness. The telephone cord, a pen and note pad on the counter, a garbage can...the stuff of life. If your rendering includes such subtle things it will be much more believable, convincing. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder though.

Revit Furniture's approach is dedicated to providing consistent high quality Revit families at a low price of $.99 that they say will never change. Their priorities are content creation and rendering. They currently offer a variety of chairs, sofas, couches, tables, beds, fans, lights, dining-ware, vases, wall accessories and a dynamic flexible outdoor pergola.

They've been offering this free Barcelona chair on their site.




They are offering readers of this blog (in exchange for me writing about them) an extra free family. At $0.99 it might not seem too intimidating to download something anyway? If you are interested in this modern table and magazine family, EMAIL me and I can send you the link and code.






1 comment:

Alex Gore said...

Hey Steve, I thought about knee high camera angle like you mentioned. You see shots like this in movies inorder to give the "subject" more prominence. The only problem I found with technique in rendering is that you are so low you can't get the whole scope of the room (furniture blocks your view). I would like to hear other peoples thoughts.