Making of Winter House

Article written by Matthew Howorko.

Hello! My name is Matthew Howorko, I’m 20 years old and I live in Calgary, Canada. I’m currently studying mechanical engineering at the University of Calgary. I’m a member of the Autodesk Student Expert program so I get to help teach Autodesk’s architecture and engineering software at my university from time to time.

I’d like to say thank you very much to RenderSpirit for publishing this making of!

The house is based on the Dangle-Byrd house in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. I made this when I was living way out in the country with no internet. I had two 400×400 px reference photos of the house with me at the time so my model deviates from the actual house in a number of ways.

Here is the software I used:
1. 3ds Max 2012
2. V-Ray 2
3. Onyx 7
4. Photoshop CS5
5. Lightroom 3.6

Here are some good reference photos:

Ref 1: Front

Ref 2: Interior

And some renders:

Render 1: Front

Render 2: Kitchen

Render 3: Living Room

Render 4: Close-ups of some plants

Render 5: Pond beside the house

1.Modeling

Here is a bird’s eye view of the whole scene:

1.1 Terrain
When I was modeling the terrain, I started with a relatively low-poly Plane object and added height to it using the Paint Deformation option in Max’s Editable Poly modifier. Then, I subdivide the mesh using TurboSmooth and applied several Noise modifiers on top (using different scale values to add random details).

I find it’s handy to keep all these modifiers in the stack at all times so I can go back to the beginning steps and make changes that will propagate through all the other steps that came after.

Here’s the final result:

For adding details like footprints in the snow, I subdivided the terrain mesh further only in places where the footprints would be, then using the Paint Deformation tool again, I sculpted in the foot prints.

The Trees/Snow
I modeled the trees using a program named Onyx. It’s pretty easy to make trees in that software, though it’ll usually be easier to just use a model floating around on the internet.

After importing the models into Max, I set up a particle system, set the trees as collision objects (with a UDeflector), and let particles stick onto the surfaces to simulate snow falling on them. After that, I used a blob mesh object to create a mesh around all the particles that had fallen.

This is also the method I used to add snow to the outside of the house.

Here is an example setup:

Each tree is pretty heavy on the polygon count so I used a scattering plug-in to place instances around the scene. Once I had six different trees, a bush, and some tall grass, I placed them on the terrain using Forest (the scattering plug-in).

Here are the trees I ended up scattering:

Every tree in the renders is just a rotated and scaled version of the models above.

1.2 The House

I know my model is not accurate to the real house, but I was just trying to have fun with it :)

Sweeps
I made most of the objects on the house using the Sweep tool. I found it to be a good way to keep the geometry easily controlled: by instancing repeating structure parts, they all can be changed at the same time by editing just one point on one of the splines. I think that’s pretty great! Almost the whole exterior of the house was controlled by just a few splines.

Another example of this can be seen on the kitchen stools where I swept a circle shape along another spline to make the legs:

The Ceiling
I made the ceiling using a great script called Floor Generator made by Jerry Ylilammi. I removed holes for the lights using a Boolean compound object and some cylinders.

Fillets and Rounds
One thing that I think characterizes unrealistic CG images is perfect hard edges. I like to add slight fillets and rounds to the hard edges to avoid this effect.

Here are a few examples:

2. Materials

Snow material
This material was the most fun to make. I tried many different ways of making it until I found the right combination of bump maps. I ended up using 3ds Max’s Substance sand map as a bump for the finer details.

I then used a combination of two different noise maps to make the snow look like it had experienced wind and hardening in different areas. The first one defined the roughness. The second was used as a mask to make it look like the weathering effects only happened in certain areas. I made the snow “sparkle” by overlaying the V-Ray car paint material.

Here is the Slate view:

There are a few ways to make the snow seem like it is scattering light from the scene in a realistic way. I faked it by overlaying a V-Ray light material with a bluish color. This gives the impression that light is getting trapped and bounced around inside. The more realistic way (though it takes longer to render) is to use a VRayFastSSS2 material which will catch and scatter all the light underneath in a more physically accurate way.

For the pond, I painted a blend map in Photoshop that I used to blend between the above snow material and a water material.

Here is the slate view:

Slate Floor Material
For the floor tiles, most of the detail comes from the displacement modifier. I think the displacement, in combination with a slight bump map in the material, makes for a nice subtle effect.

Here are the settings:

3. Lighting and rendering

3.1 Lighting

This is definitely my favourite part in the process. I tried many different times of day and methods of lighting the scene until I found one I liked.

The one that stuck for me was using just one exterior light and a couple kitchen lights to illuminate the whole scene. I used a V-Ray dome light with a HDRI plugged into the texture slot for the exterior lighting.

Here are the settings:

And the HDR:

3.2 Atmospheric Effects
I used VRayEnvFog with a mesh gizmo to add a slight fog to the scene as well. Though the effect is subtle, I think it helps add a sense of scale to the scene.

Here are the settings:

The mesh gizmo was basically a very large box that had the shape of the house cut-out of it so that no fog would take place inside.

3.3 Camera Settings
I setup up V-Ray Physical cameras just about everywhere to try out different angles. When I was satisfied with a shot I would do a couple test renders and then make a final render. DOF was done in 3ds Max as well.

Here are the camera settings…

3.4 Renderer Settings

Pretty standard setup for the render settings.

You can see what I set here:

Something to note in the Light cache settings is the “Retrace threshold” option. I found this very helpful for calculating GI in areas with dense geometry. Basically, it refines the GI samples in areas where light leaks would happen.

One thing I noticed when doing this project is how gamma affects antialiasing in V-Ray. I found that when using the default 3ds Max frame buffer and its default gamma settings, the image is not antialiased in the correct gamma space. To correct for this I just used the V-Ray frame buffer and adjusted the gamma accordingly in the Color Mapping tab.

Here is an example of what I’m saying:

4. Post

Luckily, I didn’t have to do very much post on any of the final renders. I find it is very quick and easy to adjust my renders using Adobe Lightroom.

Here is a before and after of the kitchen render after adjusting some color balance, exposure, and adding chromatic aberration in Lightroom:

Final Images:

Render 1: Front

Render 2: Kitchen

Render 3: Living Room

Render 4: Close-ups of some plants

Render 5: Pond beside the house

I hope I have been able to share some useful info! If anyone wants me to send them part of the scene, let me know. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments area below.