Lighting Visualization Gallery

Residential Building

Student Work, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Copyright: Oliver Schwartz, 1999
Design and Simulations: Oliver Schwartz

The following images were among the first presentable results from the Rayfront beta tests. The designer, a student of architecture at the Swiss Federal Technical Institute of Technology ETH, used ArchiCAD to build the model, then converted the geometry with Paul Bourke's translator. The so created file was directly imported into Rayfront and the final results can be seen here.

South Elevation

Rayfront gives you complete liberty in defining your views (or "cameras"). Setting up a front elevation view is very simple, and the resulting image required only minimal postprocessing just to add a plain grey background. Note that this image shows a slightly different design than the ones above.

Corner View

The building is modelled with fine details, such as the metal hand rails on the balconies and correctly constructed window frames. Although it is easy to overlook such efforts in the resulting image, they contribute a lot to the overall appearance of a simulation.

Front View

The expressive volumetric composition is presented very well by a program explicitly targeted at lighting simulation.

Material Detail

A procedural pattern renders all exterior walls as cement brick masonry. The black undersights of the cantilever slabs appear to come from assigning the same pattern as to the walls, while the chosen procedure can only handle vertical surfaces. It would be no problem for an experienced user to generalize this function for all orientations. Note that this image shows a slightly different design than the ones above.