I hesitate to call myself an artist; I hesitate to call myself an architect (which I’m technically not allowed to do anyways - yet). I have yet to feel like I truly get architecture, not in all my five years of crying and sweating and bleeding over drawings and models, not in the heart-pounding sleepless haze. But I loved it - the infrequent highs and the lowest lows, always after something, pursuing this idealistic standard of craft, representation, intention. I loved it, I love it still. The beauty of school was that it allowed you to fixate on certain aspects of a thing, to be absolutely obsessed.
I hesitate to call myself an artist; though my current job title is 3D artist intern, the process of relearning to shape and refine the tools I have haphazardly stitched together, (creating a patchwork workflow which worked fine in terms of academia but not so much in terms of billable hours) is tedious and methodical, not exactly what I would call art. More of a technical process like creating a basic dovetail joint or preparing stock for the CNC, less like blowing through commands and layers and instinctively shaping arbitrarily. They tell me it will come with time so for now I will be satisfied with clear, simple renders of olive oil containers and satellite disk-shaped chairs.
Arbitrary was a word I tried to erase from my vocabulary in second year, third year; I sought out a rationale for every single little thing lest someone tell me that my designs and projects were not intentional enough, my arguments lacking cohesion, my reasoning falling short. I spent more time thinking than designing, more time intending to than tending to. Now I find that I want the arbitrary, I want the happy accidents, I want the freedom that comes with not knowing where you’re headed in a design, in a project, in life.
I hesitate to call myself an artist; I hesitate to call myself an architect - because in my thoughts the two are inseparable; what is art without some form of underlying structure and what is architecture without expression? I want to find structure in abstraction; I want to find beauty in a simple floorplan. I want to be both - and so I hesitate.
Been working these past two few weeks on scenes from my (parent’s) house, prioritizing accurate lighting and placement of objects in the scenes. I feel mostly comfortable making most materials now, though I do have to sample some to remember how I made them and/or see how they were made.
I’ve also learned about render settings, thanks to some render presets that H made me. There are three: Low IR, Progressive, and HQ. This grainy image above is courtesy of Progressive (though it does get a little better than this). Progressive is basically a static version of the active shader, and it’s probably also my favorite because you get a good idea of what the final will look like in a minute or two. Low IR = Low Irradiance Map, and its basically a lower quality (but fully rendered out) version of the final, which means you might get weird little light leaks or artifacts sometimes. Low IR is probably my least favorite. HQ is the standard for final quality renders, as you might have guessed.
Most of the differences between these presets are found in the GI algorithms that are used (Irradiance Map vs Brute Force vs Light Cache, etc) and the number of max subdivs allowed. I’m still figuring out what a lot of these settings mean and the visible ways in which they affect a rendering.
I also did a few depth of field renders just for fun (also because I really need to start using my camera 24/7 again and I miss it.) Honestly, big shoutout to evermotion for a bunch of these models as well, though I should probably rely less on them because even though I’m getting comfortable with the Max interface and hotkeys and shortcuts, I still don’t feel that confident about modeling anything thats not a box, plane, or simple cylinder with an edit poly thrown onto it. Another big thing I’ve been working on with these renders is making sure that the exposure is spot-on so details don’t get burned out. Color mapping and the pixel checker have been my new bff these past two weeks, with the ability to tweak the Reinhardt color mapping algorithm being the real MVP.
In addition to the dining room, I also got to work on a few scenes with the kitchen, and it is reasonably close to how it looks in real life. I think I need to be a little more open minded and willing to take risks about picking camera angles; thankfully there’s a box you can check to fix/align the perspective if your camera and camera target are in totally different places and your view is looking funky. In lieu of using an HDRI for this file, I’m using a sun (and wow the sun tool in Max is great also because you can literally place it exactly where on the earth it is supposed to be - something that I always faked in school to generate cool shadows wherever I wanted. Ha). In this scene, in addition to the sun, I’m also using an IES light which is creating the scalloping on the upper cabinets, an angled plane light as a fill light to create some “chromatic contrast” (as H would call it) and a fill light underneath the bank of cabinets on the right to mimic the LED-bottomed cabinets. The temperatures of the lights (ranging from warm to cool) are what create that chromatic contrast.
Here’s one more DOF just for fun, with the bowl of grapes that made all my renders take about 15 more minutes than they needed to. I’ve moved onto the living room, and will continue to fill out the house with more objects and lighting setups, but am hoping for some other things to work on as well (tracing floorplans, cataloguing assets???) It’s cool seeing how far I’ve come from when I started a little over a month ago, and hopefully I’m a total badass by February or March so I can get hired full-time, cause I’m digging this job.
a memory: we are in second year, fall quarter and the air is getting crisp. sitting at our discussion table which also happens to be our eating table, our sleeping table, our modelling table, and on happy occasions, our dancing table.
“does your family speak Mexican at home?”
and we stare at our professor, the silver fox en vogue that everyone wants to take, mouths wide open.
the question is shrugged off and no one bothers to correct him.
and another: we are still in fall quarter, the beginning course of architectural history driving us mad.
a girl who excelled at art history in high school walks in.
“that test was so confusing - I kept mixing up China, India, and Japan.”
we sit there without a reaction as we try to forget the fact that we probably all failed the test -
and glancing around and seeing me and two other asian girls, she takes this to mean that it was not as challenging for us
“i don’t think i did that well - i don’t speak Buddhist”
right in front of two girls whose families are devout Buddhists.
the silence is so loud.
later, I ask one of the two girls if she is like that because her father passed away.
Started out a little differently this week by doing some PA work on a commercial shoot for a project in the works in SOMA. It was a nice change of pace from working at the office everyday. As the newest intern, I was appointed wardrobe person and mostly spent time steaming clothes (lol but it was actually kind of fun/satisfying). Pretty cool stuff to begin week three; it was an exhausting but satisfying 10 hour day in studio, and we’ll be wrapping up shooting hopefully sometime this week on site.
Back in the office, I still haven’t gotten a chance to talk to the big boss about specific furniture/material details and so I spent most of this week working on trying to create more realistic/accurate materials in vray and playing around with various lighting setups and in-camera settings such as depth of field. I attempted to make corten, brushed steel, marble, resin, coffee, and various other materials with varying degrees of success; in the end, it seems that having a pretty good grasp of simple glass/metal materials makes it fairly easy to model 85% of all the materials you will ever need with a decent texture for the diffuse and bump maps.
I also learned to use a new lighting setup with a dome light and HDRI combo (seriously fangirling HDRI right now cause its more fun/natural looking than plane/fill/IES lights and also #datreflection). Pretty stoked about this last render and the way it turned out with the DOF and the “coffee” material thats actually just glass that was a little tweaked.
Currently I’m working on some scenes from my house because I’m still waiting on instruction for the apartment project, but I guess that’s the typical life of an intern. Excited to keep learning and getting these little snapshots closer to photoreal.
Some of the work I’ve been doing at my internship!
since graduating in June, I’ve honestly been pretty lazy for the most part. however, I have managed to
+ finish my thesis book (!!!!!) https://issuu.com/elizabethewong/docs/productive_disassembly_._pages_5 + intern with an underground opera company in West Oakland + finish parks + rec, friday night lights, etc + run four miles in a single run + complete a set of floorplans for our house remodel (almost) + obtain an internship at a rendering/visualization firm in SF + start a blog detailing what I learn/the intricacies and differences of working on visualization in school as opposed to the real world: revizionist.tumblr.com
Problems with the real-world architecture industry versus school
+ nobody is interested in interstitial urbanism or even normal urbanism
+ four letter firms don’t appreciate magenta renderings
+ everyone is suddenly excited about revit
+ and autocad
+ not enough cool projects
+ even fewer cool firms
+ entry pay is less than interns in other industries that require a similar level of education
I remember it best when the air is brisk and the sun is set but there’s still light out; feet pounding gravel or pavement and running (much more slowly) than I did five or six years ago. It’s a few days before Thanksgiving, it’s over winter break, it’s recovery day and we are jogging down Bernal picking apples and our future houses and someone is baking chocolate chip cookies with their windows open.
It’s the last stretch of our workout and we are growing and hungry and have way too much homework to do. Our parents pick us up and there is dinner on the table, and this is the last eighteen years of our lives and we are not quite as ready for disruption as we might think.
But some of us leave anyways, and eventually all of us have to - and our most vivid memory of a place we once called home but still live in is conjured up by a chill breeze, a bleak sky.
