I recently backed up this project from 2010 onto a “fresh” hard drive, and I realized that although it was present on an older version of the Rhino 3D gallery, it somehow wasn’t represented any more in the current version.
These post-processed renderings from a Rhino model were created for a design competition, putatively to mark an artesian spring of some historic significance in Scotland, the original Victorian monument having collapsed. My entry, entitled “WoL”, didn’t win or even place, but I still like how the renderings “turned out”. This was the first project where I used Rhino as both the modeler and rendering application; previously, I had used it to make assets to export to other applications. Rhino 4 was the current version at the time, but somehow (perhaps I just downloaded it from the Rhino website of the time) I was able to get a “renderer development kit” plugin that was in beta. Not everything worked with this plugin, or else I simply didn’t understand the undocumented settings to make it work: for instance, there seemed to be no way to simulate a mirror-like reflective surface. So to get the reflection of the telamon structures in the pool I had to flip parts of the model immediately above the water below the surface, do a separate rendering, and then combine that with the main “right-side up” rendering using careful masking in Photoshop.
This is a test of the faked-reflection post-processing concept, and I preserved it because I appreciated its sketch-like quality:
I was teaching a class in architectural illustration at the time, so the project as a whole made for an interesting example of how to work around software limitations.
Aerial perspective:
Here’s an uncropped version of the aerial perspective image that I also happened to preserve, which hints at the extent to which I digitally-overpainted and post-processed the Rhino output. As well as the reflection simulation, I was experimenting for the first time with overlaying captured viewport displays (with customized display modes) onto shaded rendered images of the model.
Site plan “water-colorized” with post-processing in Photoshop:
Finally, after the original design competition, I reformatted the renderings as this poster entry for an architectural illustration contest, which I also failed to win:
