Clients usually don't like experiments very much, but when you've been working for a client for a long time and you know that he will appreciate a little effort to change, then your Archviz production process can become interesting again. Enjoy!
About Me.
Hello to all fans of 3D graphics!
My name is Jiří Matys and I'm a 3D graphic designer from the Czech Republic. I started with 3D graphics more than 25 years ago on a 14 MHz Amiga computer in LightWave 3D. Without the internet, YouTube, and other things that are completely normal these days, I had to figure everything out on my own. Gradually, I focused on architectural visualizations of the interior and exterior, but sometimes I also create product visualizations, videos, animations, print graphics, etc.
Software Used & Models.
I created the whole project in 3ds Max and V-Ray renderer, which I have been using for a very long time. I used the Forest Pack plug-in from Itoo to distribute the greenery. I used 3Dsky, Evermotion and Vertex Trees online stores for a few models and some materials from Quixel Megascans.
About The Project.
The whole project was created as a commission of my long-time client. They wanted to make a visualization of their newly designed house for more "affluent" customers. The house is therefore large and spacious, with larger rooms, but at the same time a large outdoor space connecting the individual parts of the house with a dominant pool. Because I like to do day and night versions and the client has already got used to it, he wanted nice night views in addition to day shots.
Modeling.
The modeling was quite simple. It was more or less box modeling using Smart Extrude and a few booleans.
I modeled the ground floor and the first floor separately and also the ceilings separately. Finally, I connected everything via a boolean so I could use Chamfer to round the corners. If the model of the house was in more pieces, the plaster would show an ugly sharp edge so well known from 3D graphics, which does not have much in common with the real world. Since inside the ceiling is made of the same material as the walls (no wooden tiles or something like that), I joined both all parts of the house and the ceiling into one piece. Of course, the floor is made of a different material, so I always leave it separately.
Unfortunately, after connecting all the parts, the client changed his mind about the layout of several rooms and it was still necessary to adjust it, which was a bit more complicated in one piece. Therefore, always be sure that the model is ready before you connect all the parts.
I used the Floor Generator plug-in for the wood around the house. It is true that a similar result can be created with the Array modifier, which is now part of the 3ds max. However, the Floor Generator is becoming more and more efficient for creating floors and everything is done much faster.
Composition.
The scene is quite simple. The client did not want any slope or elevation. Only on the side of the house by the pool, there is a little uneven terrain, so that especially in the night shot you can see the play of light and shadow.
I created this simply by tessellating at this point and then using the Push/Pull function from the Ribbon. On the rest of the scene, there is only the road and then grass and vegetation in the area. To make it a little more interesting, I removed a few trees through the Paint feature in the Forest Pack and added another house to the background, which I had done for the client before, to disturb the paternity of repeating trees and shrubs a bit.
..
For grass, I used the Exclude Object area type and chose two tall trees near the house with falloff by density and falloff by scale settings. By doing so, I partially removed the grass around these tall trees, as it happens in reality.
Lighting.
For this project, I didn't want to do standard sunny lighting. Archviz projects usually stand out nicely due to the contrast of light and shadow, but this time I wanted a change. I didn't want to make the weather really cloudy (more on that next time), but rather partly cloudy, with a little sunset and a little fog. To see that the house is nice in any weather. Clients usually don't like experiments very much, but I've been working for this client for a long time and I know that they will appreciate a little effort to change.
So I used HDR image 1744 from 3DCollective for daylight.
And for night lighting, it was HDR Sunset 023 from NoEmotion, which is now part of V-Ray thanks to the Chaos Cosmos browser.
To illuminate the inside, I used several Vray IES lights and standard Vray Plane and Disc lights with Directionality around 0.3 to 0.7 depending on the type of light.
For night lighting, there were a lot more lights in the interior, but basically just clones of already used lights. This also applied to the spotlights on the ceiling outside. However, there was still something missing from the lighting. The lights did not shine far enough to illuminate the grass as the client wanted, the pool area was simply too big. So I used a large rectangular light above the pool facing the grass as you can see in the picture. With the Directionality setting of 0.3, I achieved the desired result.
Materials.
The materials are quite basic. In the picture you can look at the pavement, wooden cladding and ground under the grass. The second picture shows the stucco of the house where I used VrayBlend material to create dirt using VRayDirt where desired.
Post-Production.
As always, I do post-production directly in Vray VFB. The picture shows the VFB settings for the night shot. Then I opened the final image in Photoshop, where I usually use the Camera Raw filter to do some final changes. I adjusted the brightness and contrast in it because it has more settings than VFB. Finally, I added a vignette.
Final Images.
That is all. Here you can sample some final images after post-production.
Kind regards,
Jiří Matys.
About the artist
Jiří Matys is a 3D graphic designer based in the Czech Republic. With more than 25 years of experience, he focuses on architectural visualizations of interior and exterior spaces, and he also creates product visualizations, videos, animations, and print graphics.
