House in Antwerp

V-Ray V-Ray Common Gallery
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For years I’ve been watching Peter Guthrie, Bertrand Benoit and Alex Roman, reading every bit of information there was to find on how to produce some high quality architectural visualizations. At my daytime job I don’t have the time at all to produce these kind of images, or to experiment with Vray features as fog, dof. Let alone create procedural shaders like Grant Warwick. But a few months back I’ve acquired a job that gave me the opportunity to create images that incorporated a lot of the things I’ve learned over the last few years, and especially months thanks to Grant Warwick’s mastering Vray. Be that as it may, it’s not because you read or watch the tips these professionals give, that I knew exactly how to do achieve the result I had in my mind without any practice whatsoever.

Well here are the images I produced, they’re 90% finished. They rendered in about 5-6 hours each, with a noise threshold that’s a little bit too high but I’ll rerender them this week at 4K resolution with a lower noise threshold. Maybe I’ll add some more details (more leaves, little stones/dirt/branches and some more props) and also displacement of my bricks.

I still haven’t figured out how to properly do the DOF in vray. It’s there but way too subtle, I wanted the tree branches and leaves at the top to be out of focus but instead the foreground is and the tree isn’t, so still need to fix that.

In all I’ve learned these things during this project and first time using all of these:

-ForestPack (trees, grass, leaves,…)
-Railclone (the roofs)
-VIZPARK Walls & Tiles
-Vrayenvironment fog
-Vray Displacement map
-DOF
-Procedural shader creation with bercon maps thanks to Grant Warwick
-Mudbox modelling to create the rooftiles
-Speedtree for the trees
-BF rendering and proper scene optimization
-Vray lens effects
-Vraycaustics (I left them out in the end because they were almost invisible with these point of views)

Things I need to learn next time I do a project on my own:

-Organization :smile:

Well here they are. Feel free to C&C. (You might want to drag them in a new tab of your browser to fully view them, especially the landscape one)

And here is a detail of my roof. I modeled 4 tiles in mudbox and then used railcone to put them on my roof. Each tile was 800 000 polygons in this image, which turned out to be way too heavy so I had to reduce them to about 7000 each. The roof material is entirely procedural.

And one of the 100% procedural maps I created (in this case the bluestone, mind the little fossils :slight_smile: ):

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Great work…
I think that the external floor is really dangerous… :wink:

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That roof tile is sick :slight_smile:

I dig the compositions. My main crit would be the harshness of the edges in the brick. & a few of those tree leaves have something odd going on with their spec.

Great work! Lovely use of Forest Pack & Railclone

4

Could you maybe explain what might be wrong or pin point me to exactly what you think is weird with the leaf material, or the harshness of the brick edges?

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Haha yeah, it’s an old pavement and kind of looks like that :slight_smile:

6

Looks gorgeous - what aa filter are you using though? It’s all very sharp - almost sandpaper-ish with the noise :smile:

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With the brick, its almost too sharp and clean. Needs a bit more texture. Especially compared to how nice your roof tiles are - look great by the way.
Im interested how you made the procedural material?

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I’m aware of the brick being a little too clean but I haven’t found a way to dirty it up so it doesn’t look fake. I’m using walls and tiles with 9 different bricks blend with some vraydirt and dirt streaks under the windows (very subtle). I put another blend map over the top to introduce some dirt overall but haven’t found a good way to do it, so I removed it as my deadline approached. I might experiment with this later on. As for the roof tiles; here’s the slate preview of one of them (I made 5 different ones based on the first one, that vary in diffuse and reflection only with a color correct, and put them in a multisub).

I rendered it without AA filter. Although I didn’t use any post production (everything is straight out of the VFB), I did use photoshop to sharpen the image. And because of the higher noise threshold (DMC of 0.015) it makes the noise a bit more apparent sharpening the image. I don’t mind though. But I’ll rerender with a lower threshold on a higher resolution.

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Beautiful images! Yes, a little too sharp. And, the slate is awesome!

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Thank you. Just wondering, how long would it take you guys to create these kind of images, equal attention to detail.

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far too sharp and cg, almost hurts to look at
the leaves look like cardboard in the foreground, composistionally id lose them as it feels quite cramped.

agree on that slate texture looking amazing!

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I have to agree about the AA filter, it is so sharp it makes my eyes bleed. It’s a shame though, because otherwise you’ve got quite a nice set of images, nice attention to detail. Slate looks great.

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Well there’s A LOT of trees in the neighborhood of the house, I even left all of the trees on the terrain out because otherwise nothing would be visible of the building, and the architect requested a really green environment. I don’t mind compositionally though, but I agree on the realism of the leaves. Any ideas how I could improve them. It’s a 2side vray material with a translucency map with the veins of the leaf, and a slightly lighter back with less reflection.

About too cg, what is it exactly that is too cg, apart from maybe being too clean (it is a new building after all so I can’t dirty it up that much).

There’s no AA filter, only a bit of sharpening in Photoshop. I’ll see what will happen if I render them with better quality and no sharpening in photoshop.

The architect has some changes to make so I might have some time to make the images better. So any suggestions or tips to make them better are really appreciated.

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I like to use the area filter with a size of 2, it softens edges in a really pleasing way.

If photorealism is what you’re after, use some reference photographs and look at how sharp they are (or aren’t!).

15

Have to say the light in the really warm low sunlight through the trees image is gorgeous.

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I’ll give that a try, will post here with updates.

Do you have any good names of good photographers as I don’t know any :slight_smile: And I feel like I really need to dig in to photography myself a bit more.

Thank you, I like the morning feel it gives.

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I love the colors, especially with the warm interior contrasting the exterior colors. Materials are amazing!

One thing I wanted to comment on was the 2point perspective, it makes the building seem top-heavy in your compositions. I’d dial that back a little bit and allow some 3 point perspective in your views.

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Thank you; could you provide me with a 3 point perspective example where it was called for and adds to the composition? Because, personally, photos/renders where 3 point perspective is used from an eye level point of view always make me feel as if the photographer is falling :slight_smile:

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OK, here’s an example. I did a slight lens shift so it’s closer to 2pt, but I still allowed for some sense of receding in natural perspective. Maybe it’s just your composition with the wide angle makes the image more distorted. I really liked these images here: http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?79393-Offices-Just-offices and these seem to be all 2pt, but I think the camera angle is not as wide, so they don’t feel so distorted. Maybe if you have a way to narrow your FOV it would help.

301_night_05.jpg
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That’s a matter of personal taste I guess. I don’t think it would benefit much from a 3 points perspective :slight_smile: