The Eco Barn was a very interesting project to work with.
An old barn is to be renovated and turned into a conference center for teaching ecological farming and cooking.
The timber comes from their own forest where it is draged by horse to the local sawmill where they saw it to planks.
The red barns are very typical to Sweden and are painted with Falu red paint, that is made from a byproduct of the Falun coppermine.
It is told that long ago, in preparations for a kings tour of the country, the farmers first started painting their wooden houses with Falu red paint so that they would look like wealthy red brick houses in a distance.
I wanted to create an image that was kind of desaturated and down to earth and did some post pro in Photoshop to tone down the green so that the red barn would be the main color of the image.
The overcast sky was made to match the color of the solar panels on the roof.
Everything was modelled in SketchUp and I used Skatter to scatter all the plants and grass.
The image was rendered with Thea render, 4500 pixels wide, with the Adaptive AMC engine.
As I did the final work at home on my laptop it turned out a bit too much for the 2GB GPU so I couldn’t render it with the Presto CPU+GPU engine that I normally use.
I wanted the foreground out of focus so that the eyes wouldn’t get stuck there but instead let them gently glide over to the main building. The focal point.
The customer also wanted to show that they have sheep and hens so I added a few hens in the foreground and some sheep to the right in the background meadow.
I tried placing people at different places in the image but decided that even though some looked great they kind of took focus from the building so I decided to remove a few of them.
Finally I decided to add a dark foreground tree branch to add some depth and contrast to the overcast sky.
The project had a limited budget so some shortcuts had to be made but all in all it was a very interesting project that I might return to just for my own pleasure one day.
