Mtn House

[OPEN_RANGE]

Here is a house in the mountains of colorado. I live/work very close to the site. At this time there is still a lot of snow, no green plants or leaves on trees. Transitional time of year. CLient does not have any usable site photogrpahy and I do not have quite the right photo in my archive. So... background is google earth, which I don't like but not sure what else to do. I will likely photo the site and replace the background when summer is in full swing - mid June.

I also have the opposite view to be completed and added to this post soon. Background photo for that may be even more problematic.

All critique and any suggestions most welcome.

[Morne]

You work on pretty cool projects, and they all have potential. However all your renders have some things in common, they're pretty flat!
The lighting is ok(ish), but you need to work on your materials. For your glass, I would cheat it and make the reflection IOR 2 or even 2.1. You either need some displacement on the timber and rock, or a normal map, or even both. Make sure ALL your materials have some kind of reflection on it.
Make use of the reflection render element as well as the specular render element.
In post, if you comp in 8 bit, stick the reflection as well as specular on top of your render in screen mode, then play with the layer opacity
If you comp in 32bit, stick those 2 layers in as linear dodge(add) mode, and play with layer opacity

Get a hold of Dave Wortley's VRay Multimatte Power Masker script. It will create material ID's for you of all your materials and add the corresponding multimatte elements. This will give you masks of all your different materials, which you can use to limit the reflection/specular (or boost it) of specific elements.
https://davewortley.wordpress.com/20.../power-masker/

Don't get me wrong, I know this is in the middle of nowhere and using natural materials that will most likely collect dust and be bit dirty. But suttle highlights makes a world of difference.

Once you get a hang of those things, you can push it a bit furher with vraydirt and various grunge, water leak textures to add some extra bits too make it look even more natural
Interior curtains and or blinds peaking in from the sides/tops of windows will also help create some depth

Good job on the foregroud planting. Looks pretty nice. Maybe just darken some of the greens on some of the plants. Same goes for the 5 trees at the back on the right. They need be slightly darker

You can also try a very slight S curve in PS to boost the contrast a tad...

EDIT: just tried an S curve on this one and that alone already improves things a bit. You can use the presets and select "Linear Contrast (RGB)". You can try excluding the background from this curve and see if it looks better/worse

[glorybound]

I agree with Morne. A side note... PSD Manager will create a mask of all your MAX layers, which to me, is invaluable. For composition, if you look at my work, I have things 2/3 in light and 1/3 in shadow. I also have my structures rotated so the front, which is in light, as 2/3 of the image. Not that my images are the rule, by any mean, but I think you get good contrast and interest when you follow these rules. Also, your renderings seem to have your houses smack dab in the middle of your image. Something should take precedence, either the foreground is more interesting or the sky is, you should put whichever is the priority on the third horizontal line of your images. In this image, the mountains and sky are the key, so I would drop your horizon way down so that most of the image is the sky. You would have 1/3 foreground, your house, and then everything else is mountains and sky. Have you tried Topaz Gigapixel AI to up-sample the Google Image?

[OPEN_RANGE]

Wow, thank both of you so much for your excellent and detailed replies! I cannot overstate how valuable that is to me.

I forgot to add that I'm using Max 2020 and this model is a Revit file provided by others. Although Max 2020 offers almost nothing new. the Revit import has been improved and it's helpful.

I have had the same general critique regarding materials before and I have tired to address it but still not getting it right it seems. The trouble I have is addling very much reflection amount to the materials starts to tint them blue as they reflect the sky. I adjusted the reflection and glossiness amounts on all the materials for this second pass.

I increased the glass refract IOR to 2.1 but it made an almost imperceptible difference. It mostly increased the glancing reflections on the left (East) facing windows.

I had/have vray displacement modifier on the wood siding and stone. I use it for the joints/course lines. So for stone I have a black and white map the white is all the joints and I use a negative 2" amount. I do it this way because positive displacements separates the corners of the wall geometry. I was using a bump map also and amount was up to 200. I have replaced that with a vray normal map. I think it looks better now. The wood siding has the same arrangement. I use a negative displacement to accentuate the joints between courses. The designer instructed that the siding would be butted together very tightly with really no joint visible but I put a little bit in so it reads like separate boards versus a sheet of plywood.

All of the materials do have reflection amounts. In general for organic materials like wood siding, stone and concrete I have been using a reflect amount of about 4-8. I have increased to 15 for this second pass. Any more and the materials start to take on a bluish tint and get too light. I typically use glossiness 0.8 - 0.7. I use Fresnel with Fresnel IOR 3 - 6. Do these values sound correct?

I have not yet incorporated using reflection and specular render elements. I will find the time to get up to speed with that, at the moment I cannot. I do render out to 32 bit exr.

I used to routinely add the liner contrast curve adjustment layer in Pshop to boost contrast. For this I tried to achieve the same thing using the camera RAW filter. I've just started/evolved into turning the 32 bit exr into a smart object, convert to 16 bit so all pshop filters can be used, use smart filters like camera RAW. All non destructive. So, I'm post processing in 32 bit but not yet incorporating the render elements as you describe. I added the linear contrast curve to this updated version, definitely helps it pop.

I should say, and I'm not trying to justify or argue a point, but all the projects around here that I work on are reviewed by various approval boards. All of the design regs specifically state that non reflective materials are to be used, amount of glazing is limited, and so on. All projects are intended to blend in and not be reflective or stand out and intrude on the mountain scenery. So, anything shiny is a red flag for an approval board.

I had a little feedback from the client. Mainly make all the metal (fascia, window frames, roofing, etc.) BLACK. So again any more reflective amount above 15 and it all starts to shift to blue as it reflects the sky.

Almost all windows in these type of homes use motorized shades in shade pockets/valances above the windows. So usually no opportunity for curtains or etc to be shown.

I tried multiple angles for this view and this is the best I could come up with. It seems to be a particularly awkward layout to get a good angle on. Same with the lighting. I tried having the sun in the North/right but it didn't look as good as moving it to where it is. Just found it difficult on this particular view to get to the 1/3 - 2/3 ratio.

I did lower the horizon and I think it's better, but now feels a bit top heavy to me. Trying to keep a 4/3 aspect but maybe will crop some of the sky. Or maybe replace the sky with a sky that has some clouds. I shoot a lot of outdoor photos and I am very conscious of the rule of thirds. Again this one seems somehow a difficult case.

I have not tried the Topaz Gigapixel. The problem with the Google Earth image is not that it's low res. Google Earth Pro outputs a 4K image. It just looks kind of cookie cutter a sort of fake compared to a real photo. Those are iconic mountains. The one to the right is a 14er and is probably the second most photographed mountain in Colorado. It is the mountain in the Coors logo.

I wanted to post this detailed reply so you would know that I take everything you have pointed out very much to heart and always strive to improve my skills in all ways . Thanks again for helping me!!!

[OPEN_RANGE]

updated w/clouds. it helps a lot but mtns still unfortunately look.....illustrated.

my impression - house looks better - primarily from linear contrast curve adjustment. stone does look flat and not showing individual rocks bulging out. looks best at garage doors, not so good elsewhere. not sure why. same material and etc is applied to all stone.

I include opposite view soon.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Another update. Client discovered he had a photo after all. It is a large panoramic I think he shot with his iphone. I cropped out the part that best matches and heavily adjusted with camera raw. not ideal but better than the google earth. I will almost certainly re-photo this later this June.

[Ihno]

I typically use glossiness 0.8 - 0.7. I use Fresnel with Fresnel IOR 3 - 6. Do these values sound correct?

There seems to be no clear answer for this. There might be materials with an IOR of 2-6.
But I think going this high in general is definitely wrong and it'll be the reason your render is looking flat.
I use an IOR of 3 for concrete sometimes BUT with a really low glossiness <0,5 and a much higher reflection amount.

I think you'd better stay in the 1-2 IOR range for most materials and use a much higher reflection amount like 50-160 or even up to 255. And use a much wider range for the glossiness 0,3-1
Your materials will reflect much more on the grazing angles which will add alot realism and depth to your image. At the same time the reflection on flat angles will be very subtle so it won't all look blue.
Try to use as much real reference as you can when you set up the materials.

[dlparisi]

Another update. Client discovered he had a photo after all. It is a large panoramic I think he shot with his iphone. I cropped out the part that best matches and heavily adjusted with camera raw. not ideal but better than the google earth. I will almost certainly re-photo this later this June.

It feels like the mountains are just way too high for this camera angle. I realize it's tough to say for sure since there's not a lot of perspective references in the photo and mountain are tall but the vanishing points of your house are no where near the horizon which feels like it should be midway between the valley floor and the mountain peaks (which is roughly what I think the elevation your house is supposed to be). Also, given the sun in the panorama, the 3d sun should be coming from the right. Usually I don't care too much about matching the exact sun angle but the strong highlights in the clouds really jumped out at me. Looking good though.

[dlparisi]

Perhaps this will help you get everything aligned and give you an idea of what should be visible with your camera angle and field of view.... Enjoy. Generated from http://www.west-racing.com/mf/?page_id=2979#

telluride.zip

[dlparisi]

...and a higher res version of the map.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Ihno - thank you for your reply. The values and etc you shared are quite different from my understanding. There is this info at link below. Not sure if it's "correct" or not but I have used it as my base. It provides good usable ranges for Reflective Fresnel IOR values. unfortunately, it does not give similar defined ranges of Reflection amount values.

https://blog.turbosquid.com/2014/04/...-2-reflection/

dparisi - Thanks also to you. I have that west racing plug in. I'm sure it works good for many people and purposes. My experience was that it unfortunately did not quite meet my needs and after trying to use it a couple of years ago I ended up feeling it was not worth the hassle and computer resource overhead. What I really wanted was to be able to add my house model, or even a box/volume/proxy the basic size and shape of my house model directly into google Earth and have it geo referenced located. This functionality used to exist in Sketchup Pro. I think it got removed after google sold sketchup. I never had Sketchup Pro, did not want to pay for license for such limited use, but I once got a local architect who had Sketchup Pro to do it. Worked good.

The west racing plug in will not locate a building. and trying to locate accurately, at the correct size and location is not at all easy or accurate. This is especially true with large areas of mountainous terrain that I need. I want a way to do prelim visualization of what mountain views might be seen thru windows and as background. Then I would always choose to get the real photos taken to match the preliminary view studies.

The west racing plug in does a nice job of capturing terrain mesh from DEM files and corresponding satellite photos from Google Earth. I don't really need that. Much better for me would be to be able to add a model or proxy into google Earth and use that.

I don't think I have the relationship between house and mountains very far off at all. I live very nearby and I'm very familiar with the area. I'm going to the site soon to verify.

Regarding sun angle - I agree with you that it's not at all favorable in the photo. but even so - the photo is far superior to the previous version shown above that is using Google Earth. I don't want to change the sun angle in the max scene to match because that does not work at all for lighting the building nicely. I will be re-photographing this in mid June after the summer green up has happened

[OPEN_RANGE]

Here is the second view. Also update first view. There was problems in the stone walls with flipped normals from the imported Revit file. Think I got it fixed now, thanks for pointing it out.

Background photo on second view also from client. Taken on a cloudy day with main mountain ridge at right all in cloud shadow. heavily worked on in pshop and replaced sky to get it to this point. Will be re-photographed mid June.

[M.Max]

The latest update is very nice and the background is much better now . good job (Y)

[OPEN_RANGE]

Thank you for checking it out and your comments M.Max!

[dgruwier]

I know this is an old thread, but I figured I'd share my thoughts anyway:

If you need IOR values above 2, then something else is likely wrong. you absolutely shouldn't need values that high. Besides, increasing the IOR has diminishing returns.
It might be that your diffuse textures are way too bright, causing them to outcompete the reflections naturally. If you go look at the albedo maps of the scanned materials from textures.com you can see that the colors are a lot darker than you might expect. Try darkening your diffuse textures, using textures.com as a reference, and increasing the brightness of the light to compensate. That will likely give you more realistic reflection amounts.

I think the reason the photo version of the mountains looks better is because of the atmospheric perspective. See how blue it becomes at a distance, that really helps with the depth.

If you're not using the 2sided material for your vegetation, I think that would help a lot with adding some color and softness to it that it seems to be missing.