Pleasant Hill
A Shaker Community
in Harrodsburg, KY


A 3D render from a photo by Sam Abell.
This photo was featured as the
National Geographic Picture of the Day on October 5, 2001. For more information on the Shaker Village click here The lighting and symmetry struck me as a perfect exercise to try to recreate in trueSpace. Since I had just received the latest version (6.5) of trueSpace, I thought it would be a good project to get my feet wet with the new program.

I  began by creating a plane primitive with the same aspect ratio as the reference picture, and then applied the 'Photo of the Day' to it. A camera was positioned in front of the plane at about head height, and close enough so that the plane pretty much filled the frame. Display Mode was set to Transparent Outline to make the plane semi-transparent. Using a secondary top view, Cube primitives were blocked out  to roughly approximate the size of the front and rear halls. The edges were all rounded slightly via the Magic Ring. Then it was a matter of  adjusting the size of the cubes in the top view while watching through the camera until the size and perspective matched the picture on the plane. Rather than scaling , I used the rectangle selection tool to point edit the sides of the cubes. This was to preserve the tight curved profile of the edges which would have been distorted by a simple scaling operation.

Another simple cube primitive was created and placed to become the floor. Once the basic layout matched the photo, it was time to start turning cubes into walls and ceilings. First the cubes needed to be hollowed out, so each was copied, sized smaller, and then Boolean subtracted from the outer cube. This left slightly coved corners where the walls meet themselves and the ceiling- a small but important detail to soften the edges. Next, the Curve tool was used to draw the outline of the arched doorways, and also to draw arches for the windows in the rear room. Converted to polygons, and then swept, these were used to Boolean subtract the openings for the archways and windows. Now the light can shine into the rooms. Two simple cubes were sized and positioned to match the square doorways, and these were used to cut these openings between the front and rear halls.

Once the walls are up, it's time to fit the trim. I began by drawing the cross-section profiles of the baseboard, chair rail, and pegboard trim pieces with the Add Curves tool. Once in position, they were lofted to length. A peg was lathed, then copied using the Geometry Paint tool to evenly space them along the pegboard. Furniture was generally hung from these pegs to facilitate cleaning. Doorframe trim was sized and placed; the archway trim was made from the same curve-drawn object that was used to cut the opening.

Now it was time to start building furniture. I started with the clock, again just using the photo as a template for the proportions. Luckily, Shaker design is spare and simple, so it wasn't long before a swept plane became a Shaker grandfather clock. A clip art clock face with some wing-ding font embellishments started off the texturing. The body of the clock was surfaced with a texture map/ shader combination. A sliced NURBS sphere surfaced with the dielectric shader became the glass cover for the clock face.

Next, some web research turned up enough photos of Shaker style chairs to base a model on. A separate scene was started in order to build the chair. A similar setup with the chair photos set up on semi-transparent planes was used for a template. The legs and rounded stretchers were drawn with curves, then lathed. The curved slats for the back also began as curves. These were then converted to polygons, and swept to slightly larger than their final thickness. In order to form the gentle bend of the slats, more geometry would need to be added. Heavily quad-divided primitive cubes were used to trim the front and back faces off the slats with Boolean operations. The 'Delete Edges' option was unchecked for the Boolean subtraction, leaving the quad-division lines from the cubes now transferred to the slats. They would give the Bend Tool more faces to
work with to in order to form a smooth bend. The slats were thus bent, and then positioned between the rear legs. The seat was a cube modified with the Magic Ring to shape the 4 triangular shaped sections where the cane weaving formed the distinctive profile of the seat. The wooden parts were surfaced with wood textures and shader combinations, the seat with a brown basket weave texture mottled with a color noise shader. Once complete, the chair was saved into an object library and loaded back into the main scene. Multiple copies of the chair were then hung from the pegs in the front hall and more were placed in the rear hall. Textures were adjusted to avoid repetition.

The next pieces of furniture to be built were the trestle tables for the back hall. Once again, web research provided enough photos of representative tables  to base a model on. Simple construction sped the process, which consisted of slightly rounded cubes for the top and stretchers; Curves were used to draw the outline of the bow-shaped lower legs. Surfacing was again a shader/ texture combo. The tables were placed in the back room in front of the windows where they would cast advantageous shadows, and some chairs then tucked up against them.

The final items to be modeled were the two matching stoves. The reference photo lacked enough detail, but subsequent web searching turned up close up photos of a Shaker stove. The models were based on these. Simple construction made for a simple model, again made of rounded cubes for the stove body  and cylinders for the legs and stovepipe. Textures were provided by pictures of the surfaces of an actual woodstove.

With all the models in place, I began working on finalizing textures. The walls are a two layer blend of plain colors-2 shades of white- a slight bump map, and for reflectance, mapped phong with a mask on the diffusion channel. This gave the walls a dirtier, aged look than are present in the photo, where they look freshly painted. I say: Never let reality stand in the way of a good render. Most of the models had been textured as they had been built, so only minor adjustments were needed to match tones and diffusion levels, or to hide any repetition. The floor went thru many, many revisions using a variety of settings. It ended up a 3 layer combination of the wrapped wood shader, photo textures in the color channel, and Caligari Phong and TG Blur in the reflectance channels.

By far the most time was spent on lighting. I also asked for and got plenty of help in this task first from Robert  'Trebs' Mitchell, and later from Brian 'phaedrus' Lanehart. My own experiments began with an area light outside each doorway and window. The results were less than satisfactory, considering I was using raytraced shadows. Render times were slow, and the lighting looked bad, with strange shadowing and artifacts. In the spirit of cooperation, Trebs asked if he could take a whack at lighting the scene. I zipped up the basic wall structures and sent them overseas. In a matter of literally minutes, Rob had constructed an array of about 25 local lights in a rough ring around the scene. He also added a spotlight pointing up at the ceiling due to the fact that they often aren't lit properly and 'get lost' in tS renders. This also helped alleviate some of the shadowing artifacts I was getting using only area lights. He also used shadow mapping instead of ray tracing, which is what I normally use. However, both Rob and Anthony 'Bobbins' Ware pointed out what I was doing wrong and why I could never get good results from shadow mapping. They informed me that I really needed to 'crank up those settings'- set shadow map size numerically to at least 1000 (don't accept the default High setting, which is way too low)  Sharpness to '1' (counterintuitive), and push that Quality spinner all the way up to 9. Needless to say, the results were much, much better once I was armed with this information. It also however, pointed out a lack of a way to manage large numbers of lights in trueSpace. A native tool to do tasks of this sort , or a 'Gaffer's Assistant' plug-in is needed, in my opinion. The ability to select a group of lights and change all their parameters at once would be a huge workflow improvement. I then began tweaking and tweaking this large array of lights. First I realized that the right side needed a warmer color than the left to cue the eye that the sun was on the right. I sampled the wall color in the original photo to obtain the RGB values for the warm and cool colors. Each string of lights per side was then adjusted to match. The intensity levels were also dropped on the left side to be less bright than the sunlit side. At first, the results were much better than my initial area light array, but after about 20 test renders those damn light areas at the top of the left wall were creeping back in. It really had me stumped because I just could not figure out what was causing it. While talking about it in IRC channel #truespace, Brian Lanehart offered to try his hand at lighting the scene. I once again archived the scene and sent it south to Birmingham Alabama. He had been experimenting with Image Based Lights and from the results of some of his tests I was anxious to see what he could do with the Shaker scene. On his own, he had constructed a test hallway and was already well on his way to having a working setup even before the actual scene file arrived. The rig consisted of an IBL at each window in the rear hall, one inside the front hall, one in the left arch and two in the right arch, along with 2 spotlights. All shadows were raytraced. The color and intensity scheme stayed the same, warm and bright on the right, cool and dim on the left. Brian's explanation follows: "The goal was to create a radiosity feel without the render time and prove that soft shadows are possible with ray-type shadows.  All of my attempts at lighting are with ray type shadows.  At the time, I was experimenting with large light arrays (35+ lights for the front right hall alone) of area lights with their min and max subdiv. set to their respective min and max.  This approach was working well enough generating wonderfully soft-edged shadows, but I wasn't completely satisfied with the result due the array configuration causing unwanted lighting in the back room, so I pulled out the IBL.  During the set up phase, I kept the resolution to the minimum just to get an idea of how the light would interact with the scene.  After building a much simpler light rig with IBLs, I set the IBL  fuzziness to 1 and cranked the resolution up to 32 for a simplified test scene render (no textures, no objects).  The render time was horribly unacceptable (10 IBLs in the scene, each at 32 resolution), but the results were perfect.  From here, I added back the textures and objects, pulled the resolution down to 16, and rendered the final image. Talking with other ts-ers on IRC, they thought I was truly insane for attempting area and IBL  arrays, but in the end, we all agreed the results were worth it." The final shot was rendered over a long weekend using Brian's copy of trueNet. The results are below, click for a full size view. If you wish, you can check out a selection of test renders which show the project in the various stages of completion  

Click image for larger version

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