More than real
How arch-viz company Atelier York used photoreal CG and Corona Renderer to transform a London apartment into a dream designer home
How Corona Renderer helped bring a new arch-viz project to life
With a crisp white finish, timeless features and sought-after furniture, London apartment Seaford Court is the ultimate designer pad. But it didn’t always look like this. When the owners decided to give the place a major overhaul recently, they enlisted the help of an interior designer and London- based architectural visualisation company Atelier York to visualise the new design in CGI and reveal its potential to the owner.
With a brief to refurbish Seaford Court to a very high specification, the designer – with Atelier York’s help – came up with a totally new vision for the property, bringing a beautiful, contemporary new design to life through a series of still CGI interior shots and a one-minute animation featuring the most interesting focal points.
Showing off every last detail of the new interior in all its glory required many complex CG renders, so high performing 3D software was essential. A 3ds Max- based studio, Atelier York opted to team up with Render Legion, creators of high performance 3D rendering software Corona Renderer.
“Corona’s interactive rendering integration with 3ds Max is superb – solid, reliable, and snappy,” says Atelier York director Alex York. “We’ve been asked how we achieved the very bright, clean, white look. This is almost entirely down to the design itself and the fact that Corona handles light beautifully.
“We chose Corona over other options primarily because it offered us the best possible results with the minimum of fuss,” Alex continues. “Corona is fully geared- up for artists and studios who like to work photographically and artistically
In short, Corona has simplified our workflow greatly and made our work more enjoyable than it’s been in years
rather than technically, so we could focus on making beautiful and engaging content, rather than worrying too much about sample settings or dealing with rendering artifacts.”
Racing through renders
Alex and the team also found Corona Renderer to be a pleasure to work with at what is usually a dreaded and frustrating time of a complex CG project. “Render times were, as always, a challenge, but the results were even better than we’d hoped for and well worth the additional time and cost required over alternative options,” Alex says. “The quality of light, especially of sunlight through trees, is particularly nice in Corona.”
To ease any pain of rendering times they encountered, Alex and the Atelier team put their heads together and Corona Renderer’s features to best use. “Everyone has a few tricks up their sleeve for dealing with render times, and we’re no exception,” he explains. “We found that rendering some shots that contained no natural, real-time movement of light or objects could be rendered with half as many frames and then timestretched in post- production. We couldn’t even tell the difference between the ‘proper’ shots and the stretched ones ourselves, in the end, and it quite literally halved our render times and rendering costs.”
While depth of field ( DOF) was handled entirely in post using Zdepth passes and Lenscare, Corona Renderer also played a big part. “Corona’s native DOF is very nice indeed and worthwhile in many situations,” Alex comments. “We used DOF in-render for all the stills. Corona’s render elements, particularly render masks, are very easy to set up and the fact that you can get masks out with DOF in just a few seconds is fantastic. A huge time saver.”
Hooked on Corona
However the team also needed to find a few workarounds to bring Seaford Court’s new look to life. “Corona is not without its issues, and we did encounter some others during this production,” says Alex. “The main issues we face on most projects are two rendering problems; the first is sunlight through solid glass hitting glossy reflective surfaces, resulting in areas of dark shading. The second issue is a shading artifact from Corona Sun along certain surfaces, particularly cushions and sofas, etc. Render Legion is fully aware of these issues and we very much hope a solution to both will arrive soon.”
That said, it’s clear the pros of Corona Renderer completely outshone the cons for the Atelier team during the creation of Seaford Court. “This was our first commercial project using Corona, and it certainly won’t be the last,” Alex enthuses. “In fact, we have moved our whole pipeline over to Corona fully since this project, including converting our whole asset library, and have used it on many projects since.”
“We would normally consider ourselves to be fairly renderer agnostic, but, after 10 or so years of working like technicians, Corona has allowed us to work like photographers. Instead of spending our time fiddling with sample settings and battling against other rendering issues, we could spend that same time finding interesting viewpoints and improving our models and materials using IR, with great results requiring almost no post- production.
Corona is fully geared up for artists and studios who like to work photographically and artistically
We were getting beautiful, clean results almost immediately even with placeholder objects and materials during the early phase of the project.”
“In short, Corona has simplified our workflow greatly and made our work more enjoyable than it’s been in years. The competition is changing, however, and is now very close to Corona in terms of simplification of workflow. But for us, the way Corona actually handles materials and light, and its very robust IR system, are enough to keep us here at the moment and that’s unlikely to change for some time. We’re very excited to see where Corona goes in the coming months and years.”
Atelier York will also be adopting a Corona pipeline on an upcoming new venture. “We are about to launch our new joint venture Recent Spaces, with Iain Banks, a very well-known and respected name in the arch-viz world, and we’ll happily continue using Corona.” Alex reveals. “We’re very excited to be able to publish more news about this very soon. For now, keep an eye on recentspaces.com.”