Andreas Atteneder

liquid underground from Andreas Atteneder.

The aim of this student project was to engage with the architecture of my university’s underground park garage.

Many thanks to my professor, colleagues and friends, who provided me with feedback and motivation.

Making of

I picked a DSLR camera and tried out some perspectives. I shot different exposures to be able to work in HDR later on. I also shot some 360° lightprobes, but i didn’t use them for the project.

Model

I did some rough measures and modelled the scene in Blender. I then took those photos and projected them as textures onto the mesh. It was quite time consuming to position things right. to balance out the little differences between the different projections, i used blend shapes for the environment.

The water is a simple subdivided plane with 2 different animated cloud noises applied as normal/displacement map. I followed some tutorials like those from Colin Litster. Thanks for that!

Render

To get nice reflections on the water I wanted to have a nice environment texture and found it at cgtextures.com.
I decided to render it with Yafaray rather than Blender’s internal render engine, because i wanted more advanced lighting effects like GI. Turned out to be pretty complicated. At first, there was no option to export an animation to Yafaray’s XML format, so I had to hack the exporter script to produce a bunch of XML files (one per frame, each ~60MB). I then discovered a bug in Yafaray which led to non-valid XML files that couldn’t be rendered. Luckily it was no complicated one, so I managed to fix it on my own and submit a patch to the developers of Yafaray. After years of gratefully using open source software finally something I could give back

Composition, Sound

I rendered different Yafaray passes (ambient occlusion, external light, interior light, snakes alone) and some blender internal ones (for masks, z-depth and speed vectors mainly).

Fusion is a great tool for compositing. Still I couldn’t do some things without crashing it all the time, so I had to go back and do some final touches in the blender node compositor.

To finish it of, I created some abstract sounds in Apple Logic and voila, finally done.

Software used: Ufraw, Hugin, qtpfsgui, Blender, Yafaray, Eyeon Fusion and Apple Logic.

This is the first and early version, which didn’t really satisfy my vision of the project: