Mountain House Exterior

[Luma3d]

Then you need to use a better dusk rig...use some dusk reference photography.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Those references photos are great! I would like to be able fo achieve that. The very simple lighting setup is an hdri from chaos cosmos instanced into vray dome light set to invisible. That’s the only light other than the interior lights.

Then a separate vray dome light with different chaos cosmos hdri for the sky.

Is there a chaos cosmos hdri that you would suggest for use as the main light? None that I tried seem to achieve a result like the reference photos you show.

Thanks again!

[Luma3d]

Check out poly haven for some high quality hdris.

[beenidp]

Nice detailed model as always Mark.

From your last post it sounds like you have two dome lights in the scene with different HDRIs. How about just dropping a single Cosmos HDRI onto your scene (set to visible - which is default I think) - that's all you need.
Experiment by rotating the HDRI around & use lightmix to balance out / tweak the internal lights & HDRI as required.

Luma3d's photos are a great reference - look at how the underside of the deck / balcony / roof is clearly defined - aim to lighten the black materials / boarding to achieve this.

Hope this helps.

[DanSHP]

Too much contrast and saturation. Do you use reflection on your materials? It's as if there is not enough main light driving into the scene. It's difficult to tell what time of day this is actually. Perfect view to add some depth too, adding some haze to the trees in the BG. You need to define the form of the building more too.


5 min mock up in photoshop.

[Joelaff]

Since you are asking...

The wood is VERY saturated, and definitely too red compared to your ref photo. The wood texture is clearly tiled, perhaps you could tile in PS and clean up the repetition, and then apply that.

The dark wood is VERY dark. Feels like it needs less fresnel and more reflectivity, and just a lighter value to begin with. See how it is looking nicer on the right side where you have some reflection? You could roughen up the roughness even more. I would also try to get the various black-like materials to be slightly different, more difference in their reflectivity, roughness, and fresnel values so they look like distinct materials. For instance, you would think the painted metal surfaces like the window frames and railings would be more reflective and less rough than the black wood-- from the ref photo it looks like the "black wood" is actually black metal. So definitely did not get that from yours. Perhaps a low frequency bump like the ref to get some more variance.

The lighting has no real direction to it. Try the light raking across it, 3/4 backlit is always nice, with enough frontal fill (though clients may want more frontal), or even the high noon photo is better than full frontal.

The colors in the sky are too saturated, don't seem to fit the scene, and draw my eye too much to the BG.

Some subtle DOF would help if you could get the house sharp and the trees not as sharp.

The edges of things are very hard and fine. Looks like you need some bevels in a lot of places or to use the VRayEdgeTex in the bump slot trick to fake them.

The entire image could be desaturated, and softened a touch, with a hint of vignetting, etc.

Some of the trees have a lot of blue/cyan in them, feel a bit surreal.

The interior light itself looks nice. The balance is a hint odd unless it is a dusk shot, which I think is what you are trying to do-- just not feeling that. The exterior lighting and fill could come down.

Of course this is your creation. So you take everything anyone says with a grain of salt, and put your own flair on it to truly make it yours. It's easy to get into design by committee, and end up ruining things that way too. It's most of the way there. Just little things like these, and what others have said could help push it further.

One possibility of tweaking attached. Of course you can do far more with the actual scene. I would still get more magenta out of the sky, personally.

[Joelaff]

DanSHP has that nice high-key look too. I like that.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Hi Joelaff. thnaks for your helpful comments! Sorry for the delayed reply. Just gettign back form travels.

There is no black wood on the house. There are flat horizontal metal panels and corrugated vertical metal panels.The window frames, fascia, railings and steel posts are all painted black. I do have separate materials on each and may have gone too far making them all look "black" and thus very much the same. I have a good bit of reflection on all the materials but could have boosted it on some. The flat metal panels have the highest reflective value.

I find, and experienced on this, that thee is a single digit point where no reflectivity is appraent then up the reflection value fro say 10 to 11 and suddenly big difference. Hard to get very minor variations of reflectivity in black materials. It's a revit model provided by others so not much of the geometry has chamfered or radiused edges. Most, possibly all, the materials I apply use a vray edges texture with radius 1/8-1/4.

Also regarding reflections, originally I had just the Vray HDRi reflection in the windows and it did not look good. So I added a plane with a vray light material and bitmap photo of surrounding mountainside material positioned to reflect in the windows. Plane object properties do not cast shadows, do not accept shadows. Plane vray properties do not receive or generate GI.

That little bit of reflection in the windows was a nice add BUT the plane then was blocking quite a bit of the reflection that the HDRI had previously created on a lot of the other materials, esp fascia, window frames, railings and etc. Sort of a catch 22. Maybe there is a better setup or something I need to enable in properties so the reflection Plane would not then alter all the other reflection characteristics created by the hdri?

Thanks again!