I would like to introduce my recently finished personal project visualization of the House O – Jun Igarashi Architects. I’ve decided to keep previous assumptions started by Matsubara project [url=http://www.evermotion.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?85901-House-in-Matsubara-exterior-entry]House in Matsubara – Ken?ichi Otani Architects.[/url]. My main goal was again to check entire possibilities a new version of NextLimit Maxwell renderer software. I was trying to achieve realistic mood with simple but interesting for me modern building of the japan architecture. I was playing with light, mood, weather and season. Every details of the whole scenes were created in 3D. I done final touch in 2D like colour corrections, contrast, final colour mood. I worked on that project about three months. All scenes were rendered from one to four PC machines. I know that many effects like steam, fog motion blur falling leaves for example it’s simple to make with postproduction but as I said before I wanted to make all of those effects in pure 3d scene. There are a few workflow details below:

– most of terrain materials have a displacements ( ground, tarmac, kerbs, pavement )
– diffraction, fog, steam and volumatrics were rendered by Maxwell.
– DOF – Maxwell
– most models taken from Evermotion, Viz People and CGAxis 3D collections

House O – Jun Igarashi Architects inspiration photographs and few details.

I downloaded as many blueprints as possible from the internet and  I made a basic building shape.

I decided that I would make a lot of details as 3D models as very important bumpy stripes on each facade. At the beginning of this work I didn’t make precise decisions about final views. At that time I was thinking about one or two main views and also about close-up views. Detailed model gives an opportunity to make flexible decisions about that later.

I modeled base models of the building, road and ground and exported them to Cinema 4D to make a main composition quickly and avoid work on invisible details. I made electric cables in Cinema. Cinema tools give us powerful tools to create and edit models very effectively which base on curves and extruded shapes on them.

Here is a first draft screen from my main view.

After the decision about the final camera angle, I added details to fill  my scene. I added a few ready models from Evermotion, CG Axis and Viz People libraries and especially ground models like pavement, kerbs, also antenna and electric pole and cables which I made by my own to get an influence on the final look.

Then I prepared models for very important stage of the entire work to spread a lot of small and medium size objects in my scene to achieve a realistic look of the final render. I like this phase of my work. To do that I usually use two Cinema 4D plugins: Paint On Surface  ( http://www.dns-plugins.de/paintOnSurface.php ) and SurfaceSpread ( http://www.c4d-jack.de/html/downloads/surfacespread/en/ ) to paint and spread very fast and effectively a huge number of objects in my scenes.

Above you can see screenshots directly form Cinema with finished stage objects distributing. There are single grass blades to be used in painting on tarmac slits, small stones lying also on tarmac and pavement, also on the ground at in front of the building.

To manage a huge number of objects, as I mentioned, I use a weight maps. In this case this solution gives us an opportunity to edit positions of the group of objects every time we need to correct that. Please look at the images below which show my weight maps for House O scene. First two images show tarmac two distributing layers for small stones . I needed two layers to precisely control small stones distributing with two ranges – from kerbs to distance and the second to increase density of stones close to the kerbs.

For grass and bigger stones lying on the ground in front of building I painted and used the same weightmap for both groups of objects. I was trying to keep a smooth dissolve between them, paint smooth weight maps borders for final trick. The trick was based on the use of the same weight map for both spreaded groups of objects. Generally this weight map was created for stones but I used it also for grass with invert map option. It gives me a nice effect when the stones fade out and the grass starts growing. The first image below shows a weight map and the second final result for stones and grass on the ground steered by the same weight map.

Here is an example of Surfacespread settings. Generally I use scale and rotation randomize options for natural look distributing.

These two images are final renders from tarmac and ground areas. Spreaded objects looks very well at the final images. Please look at the second image. It’s a good idea to set light which generates long shadows. It makes small forms are very well visible.

Screenshot below shows final camera view with all objects. As you can see there are trees and bushes. I added to scene Evermotion greenery models to the scene. After I made the final composition and materials, I moved them to two separated scenes. One for the trees and one for bushes and small neighborhood houses. I created for both of them a mxs Maxwell files and put them into main scene as xRef Maxwell objects. It always makes exporting time less time consuming and I recommend this solution.

Below: xRef trees scene and sample leaf tree material.

 

Below: xRef bushes and neighborhood scene and samples leaves bush materials. For a  few bushes models I used a Cinema FFD modificator to deform their shapes as I need.

Now I would like to show examples of the ground and road materials. As I mentioned at start I used a few displacement materials in my scene. I like work with Maxwell displacements. It’s powerful feature. It’s good advice to use 16 bit images at least for displacements or even 32-bit. The resolutions of these bitmaps should be also suitable. In this case my road bitmaps have 14 000 x 8600 pix. For ground grass I use grass texture taken from cg textures site and with displacement it gave me a nice  smooth ground look. Please look at images below which shows used textures and created materials for them.

One of the most difficult material was the facades material. After first tests I added very dark base layer without textures and the second base layer with textures to add some dirt on facades. I control how strong they are visible by changing opacity/mask value between them. Next I added a two glossiness and reflection layers layers for realistic final look. For this material i used textures for color and mask channel where it was necesary. These layers were very important when I created a autumn version of my scene, They were helpful to make more wet material for facades.

Here is a close up render to facade.

I like to play with light in Maxwell. Very often I mix the Sun and Sky Maxwell feature with Image Based HDR bitmaps. For main light I set the Sun&Sky and I add additional HDR images for reflection and background channel and sometimes refaction too. I used great Dutch Skies HDR bitmap from vol 1 package. It gives me an additional light setup channel in Maxwell multilight mixer except standard Sun and Sky.

After rendering I started a post production stage. I can’t reconstruct very thoroughly entire my post production process because I like to  improvise on the way to final image. Very often when I work on layers in photoshop I export my image to Lightroom or Red Giant Photo Looks and add some effects and come back to continue photoshop editing. Sometimes when I feel tired or feel that I miss my idea for final look, I take a rest and come back to work next day. I think it’s good idea to reach a point and say „enough” for post production process which offer us a hundreds ways to change our renders. In most cases I prepare a little bit less contrast images for effective editing.

My render settings. I used a aperture and obstacle maps for interesting diffraction and bloom effects. The final image was rendered in 6000×4500 pix to achieve good quality for details. Low burn value gave me a diffraction flare visible.

Raw render.

Next I was making a few attempts to find an interesting mood.

I rendered three aditional channels: Material ID, Depth and Fresnel for use in postproduction.

Here is almost ready render with final mood as I like and needed for my day version view. On the right you can see my photoshop layers. A few of them have a different types of mixing mode like multiply, overlay or soft light for example. Generally I improve some parts of the whole image like the building facades, tree crowns or tarmac.

And the final render with last Lightroom touch.

That’s all for day scene. It was pleasure to get opportunity to share my making of on Ronen great website. Thanks! If you have any questions please feel free to ask!