This article caught my eye over at iso50 talking about Alex Roman’s work on highly realistic architectural renderings. Earlier this year I saw some very similar work by Alessandro Prodan and was amazed at the quality of the work that is being produced by a single person with off-the-shelf software and technologies (3DS Max, Maya, mental ray, Vray, paint effects etc).
However, it is the lighting – as these images illustrate – that is nine-tenths of the law in creating a realistic render. The light in these images is glorious. And it’s the imperfections in that light that make these images. The light blooms in the sky, the highlights clip on the leaves and the lens creates chromatic aberrations and vignettes (must look in to those mental ray lens shaders…) which is what takes the images from ‘kind of nice’ CG to ‘amazing’ CG.
More work from Alex Roman can be found over at Third and Seventh.
