Making of K house

INSPIRATION:
The idea of this scene came to me when I bumped in to some random image on the internet and from that very first moment I was charmed by the house design of the Lefevre Beach House that is presented by architect firm Longhi Architects.
The site of this comfortable dwelling is located at the meeting point between the Pacific Ocean and the arid land of Peruvian Desert on Punta Misterio, Lima, Peru. This cool, cozy and comfy family residence is enriched by sand and water environments.
In my opinion you should always gather as much reference images and inspiration as possible. Before you create the first polygon you should already have at least one direction and thought about what it is that you’re trying to achieve.
At the time of starting this project I inscribed me for the the exterior training at CG workshop.
It was with the fantastic lectures and good advice of Pawel Podwojewski, also known as Simonhc, that I achieved the final renders.
My main application in the design process was 3d studio Max 2010 for modelling and texturing. Brix plugin for max and some scrpits like floorgenerator and Photoshop to create postproduction. Vray 1.5 was used for the final render.
MODELLING:
As for the modelling part I tried to concentrate on the building, pool with the poolhouse and deckpool. Everything in the scene is straight forward polygon modeling.
I really tried to lie down the foundations and measurements until I achieved the desired look and feel for the space. In fact this stage took me several weeks, between coffee breaks and free time, where I tried different approaches, moved walls, increased heights, thinking about a rhythm between lengths and heights etc. It’s of course not possible to plan everything in great detail at this stage, things are bound to change with proper lighting and materials, but it definitely pays off to spend a good amount of time at this stage.
These forms are modeled with simple boxes converted to editable poly and some other Boolean. As a rule I try to use the simplest mesh as possible to allow me more flexibility in editing in later stages.
TEXTURING:
I opted to model the deckpool instead of using textures. I used Floor Generator , I uses is all the time, even for walls, and facades.
Tip: This script can’t work on vertical faces, you had to lay out all the facade faces horizontally to apply the wood planks to them. After that you can put them back in place. This is one of those simple tools that really take your archviz to the next level.
Take a look at the settings:

VrayEdgesTex:
For the walls I used VrayEdgesTex for chamfering, this option adds a small chamfer to every edge (grey cube). In the bump slot I placed in a Mix map the bump map together with VrayEdgesTex and kept the mix to 50%.
A very good tutorial how to add extra details to the edges of surfaces (Tutorial by Peter Guthrie)

Glass:
An easy way of bringing your glazing to live is to add a subbtle amount of random bump to the glazing panels. Give each piece of glass a random material ID (go to modifier->Material by element), and then apply a material that has a selection of sub-materials. Make, let’s say, 5 different glass materials, each with a large noise map in the bump slot and a different strength (160-210), the refelections will distort on each piece of glass. This will break up the reflections across your facade so that it doesn’t look like one solid piece of glass.

LIGHTING:
From the beginning the idea was to put the building into a twillight. After some experiments, I’ve decided to used a VRayLight Dome with an EXR image created by my favourite and very innovative artist Peter Guthrie. (1928 Dusk Sun)
Why EXR and not HDRI?
Radiance (.hdr) is limited to sRGB colour data, where as exr. is not. The filesize of the exr. files are about 150mb, the hdr. version about 50mb, so there is more light information on the exr. files.
Before the final shot I used a small version of the EXR image to reduce memory usage and to gain a fast draft results. Be sure that for the final renders you use the large resolution image unless you want to loose your background details.

How to load the exr in 3dsmax?
Create a VRayDome light and assign an instanced EXR image to the lighting texture map slot (1). When you’re importing an EXR image into 3ds Max, choose Real Pixel Float (32bit) from the Open EXR importer settings(2) .
Set the mapping type to environment/spherical(3). Set the output of the .exr to 1 and the vraylight multiplier to 1. (4)
To rotate the EXR you need to enter a U offset value from 0-1, so to rotate 90 degrees you need to enter 0.25, 180 degrees you need to enter 0.5, 270 degrees 0.75 etc. (5)
You can also set the V value to set the horizon.
Tip:
Finding appropriate horizontal position for your light could be easily done with assigning the same EXR image in your material editor to the viewport background just to show the desired position. If you’re using this workflow you must use the same EXR you used for the dome light because this new position will be automatically assigned to the light source.
INTERIOR LIGHTS:
By populating the scene with lights, you should take care the way you control your lights in the scene. Using different names could be useful if you plan to have dozen of light sources. For this purpose I used Lightlister from 3dZver3.0  you can find on scriptspot. Some lights used on the scene are photometric lights used with custom IES files.
Update: For people who use the light lister, you now have from vray 2.0 a specific one without any scripts or plug-ins.

RENDERING:
During the period I was working at the project I had some serious
problems with the main computer, so I decided to render on an older computer HP touchsmart. That’s why I had to be very careful with the render settings to avoid crashing when I am rendering the higher images. It took me several testings to find a proper way to create a high resolution image of 2800×2432 pixels. I will explain you how I did that:
I rendered first the images in a smaller resolution (4 times lower then the nal output = 700 x 608 pixels) and saved the irradiance map pre passes (*.vrmap) plus light cache map (*.vrlmap) to use afterwards for the final image. By using this maps, when you render your final image, you will skip the Irradiance and Light cache process and go straight to the render itself and
render faster.
IRR Map settings
I set the Min and Max rate to -3 and 0. This means a high
quality Irr. Map. If I would render the final image with this
settings the application crashes, but since I am rendering at a
lower resolution just to save the irr and light cache maps it
won’t take much more than half an hour on my HP Touchsmart
to save the Irr. Map en light cache.
I also changed Single Frame to From File, and choose the
saved *.vrmap file and the light cache *.vrlmap file. I reduced
the rate settings by 2 that’s give me Min Rate-5 max rate-2
(more info how to calculate this settings you can find in The
Vray Complete Guide of Francesco Legrenzi page 238)

Rendering settings in a smaller resolution (4 times lower than the nal output= 700×608 pixels)
Rendering settings for a higher resolution (output= 2800×2432 pixels)

Render elementsWith V-Ray it’s possible to save all render elements into a single OpenEXR File, allowing you to open one file in photoshop with all the render elements as a separate layer.
Postproduction
This is where my ‘magic’ happens. I got a set of adjustments I always apply to my images. In Photoshop I did some correction with selective color, exposure and curves.Then I started to play around with the render passes, mostly blended them with soft light or screen.
That’s it I guess. I hope there’s something in this tutorial you might use to your advantage. If there’s anything left, don’t hesitate to ask.
Here you can download the original tutorial that was published at 3d artist.
you can view it on findebookee also!

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