Roces House – Vizcon 3D

Un magnifique making-of en anglais de la Roces House par Patric Verstraete, dirigeant de Vizcon3D

Je suis vraiment ravi de recevoir Patric pour ce making-of, j’avoue que j’ai suivi l’évolution du  projet sur Twitter et vu les images arrivé au fur et à mesure, c’est qu’il m’a fait saliver le bougre ! Une fois le projet terminé je l’ai immédiatement invité à publier un making-of, depuis Patric a reçu un prix largement mérité  » Image of the Week  » dans le magazine 3dArtist.

In this project I used the following tools: 3dsMax 2013, VRay 2,30, Forest PackPro, Floor Generator, QuadChamfer, Photoshop. First, I’d like you to take a look at some final images below.

  

Introduction

House Roces was designed by Govaert & Vanhoutte Architects in Bruges, Belgium. Belgian Govaert & Vanhoutte Architects’ project Villa Roces in Bruges (Belgium) was, out of five shortlisted projects, awarded as the “Leaf Award 2012” Residential Building of the Year (single occupancy) ».

I wanted to achieve the goal from the architects, “The elongated volume contrasts with the verticality of the trees. Moreover plays the idea of a glass box in the panoramic view from every living space, the experience of luxury living and a maximum daylight into the shaded forest. “

As an attempt to make the house part of the landscape, I wanted to make the sun rays write a story in the images. The sunlight gives us colors and mood.

Linear Workflow

The preparation and planning is an important step in every visualization project. I used Linear Workflow for gamma setting in my scene, and I turned the gamma to 2.2.

Modeling

I found a few plans of the building of low resolution. Roces House follows minimalism architecture with less detail so the modeling of this house can be easily and quickly done based on the images I found on Google. Modeling wasn’t anything special… just simple EditPoly modeling.

The most difficult part in modeling was to find the good scaling of all the different parts of the house. Also it’s very important to ensure that the objects have good geometry and good details. I also chamfered every corner edge of the building mostly with the Quad Chamfer Modifer. The chamfering in the windows structure was made with the “VRayEdgeTex”, I will show you later on.

 

For the wooden planks on the long wall I used Floor generator. The wooden planks were created using floor generator from CG-Source. This free script helps to save a lot of time and it’s very easy to use. As you know the script is mostly used for floor planks, but it’s also not difficult to create vertical planks! What you need to do is to rest the spline or plane on the ground and generate it using the floor generator. Once it generated, select the object, rotate it, and put it on the wall.

Vegetation

Grass

For more realistic and natural looking environment I used 5 different types-models of grass from IGrass and scattered those models with Forest Pack pro to one “grass clump”

  

Trees

I divided the trees into two categories: background trees and foreground trees. The background trees are all VRay proxies. The foreground trees are 3d models as I wanted to have the displacement of the bark on the foreground trees. I also used the new Paint Area mode in Forest Pack Pro to easily draw and painted the trees where I would like them. Before using this feature it is always necessary to have created an XY surface. I used also a background image all around the border of the terrain to prevent viewing the horizon line of the scene.

Bushes

For the bushes I used some models who were provided by FPP. In order to have more variations of the textures and colours across the models, I used Color map in FPP. This unique feature allows you to create great looking limitless variations in the vegetation. For the fallen leaves on the ground I used the Autumn leaves pack from Sergio Mereces, one of my favorite artist !

Lighting and Global Illumination

Natural Lighting is everywhere. Look out of your window and you will see the dance between lights and shadows, look inside your house and you will find spots which are perfectly lit and spots which are perfectly “non-lit”. Look up to the sky and you will understand how clouds can change the light. Observing the nature is really important, because nature can’t charge you for what it may teach you. While working with lights or say it other wise, while “lighting”, we all forget one very simple thing, which is, what is the source type of our light. Source type is the parameter which defines what kind of light would be there in our final render and what kind of shadows, saturation and contrast would it create.

We can subdivide Direct Light in two different categories, namely Sun Light(hard light) and Sky Light or Ambient Light. I would like to quote an article in VRay World by Vasilis Koutlis who explains very well the general light principles – Light in 3d Photography. In this scene I only used VRaySun+VRaySky as a direct light source. I increased the size multiplier to get the blurred shadows. I also used skylight portals at the windows, they are not meant to lighten the scene, they are meant to navigate the light particles from exterior into interior.

Shading & Texturing

Big wall

Windows

VRayDirt in the diffuse map and VRayEdgesTex on the bump slot to smooth the edges of the geometry.

 

Parquet floor

The floor part was the greatest challenge for me, because I wanted to have a nice, soft reflection. I’ve painted the diffuse map in Photoshop from some textures which I found on CG textures. For the reflection and glossiness map I used ColorCorrection to change the gamma, red, green and blue values and removing a bit of the saturation. For the bump map I “mixed” the bump map with VrayEdgeTex, this way it can be used as a map to produce a round corners effect for the object.

Just for notes, if you want to create your own reflection maps in photoshop: start with black and white and increase contrast with levels and curves.

The other advice I would like to share is to set the Blur to min 0,5 and summed area on which give you the nice crisp textures in renders. Since I posted RoceHouse on several forums, I received many requests to share the flooring material and textures, so for those who wanted it, grab it here!

Wood Floor Textures

Focus and composition

The composition and focus were the result of a search through major legislation such as the middle third and vanishing point. I love the front camera with little perspective, especially when it comes to conveying peace and tranquility.

  

Postwork

I didn’t have to do very much post on any of the final renders. For postproduction in Photoshop, I highly recommend to use VrayRenderElements. those maps can make real miracles. I encourage you to save VrayReflection, VrayRefraction, VrayObjectID, VraySpecular and VrayZDepth, those are basic maps, but with Photoshop blending modes they really make a difference.

Render Setup

I like to use Vray Frame Buffer and Exponential Color Mapping, this let me control in a better way the contrast and burning on the raw render. Also I used linear workflow for all the renders. In case you aren’t sure how to set it up, here are the settings

I hope you enjoyed the process of making this image as much as I did. I also like to thank Matt for giving me the chance to publish this on his blog.