Making Of 'Silent House'

Sérgio Merêces gives us a rundown of the workflow behind his arch-viz image Silent House

I'd like to share the process of creating of my last personal work: Silent House. My idea for this image was to produce a house in a quiet, silent and almost forgotten place that illustrates all the peaceful attributes of nature.

Before I start working on a project I need to feel inspired to create it. For me this is one of the most important steps! I lose time here, thinking and looking into references (these can be almost everything - like a photo, painting, movie, or simple everyday things) that inspire me to form my main idea for the project. After I get my idea I began to do quick drafts in 3D and begin to test the composition and cameras.

Project configurations

I will first show you how I set up my Gamma in my projects. In 3ds Max, I always set Space Gamma to 2.2, this will allow you to work in a linear workflow.

My gamma settings are shown here

Modeling

For the house modeling, I began with a simple box which I extruded and divided all the parts with edge loops. Then I modeled the window frames with the same technique, and for the wood floor I use the Floor Generator script. This is an awesome script to produce floor tiles, and you can find it here: www.cg-source.com/floorgenerator.php

My final model of the house

Textures and materials

I like to spend more time in this step, and test all the materials and textures to get the desired look. I used the following textures as shown in these images...

For the house exterior walls I used a metal effect

For the wooden boards I created the material here

The glass windows had a simple glass-type with a red depth color

And finally, the interior walls were concrete with red tones

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Vegetation

For the grass, bushes and trees I used different types of foliage. To spread and create the eco-system I used theForest Pack plug-in for 3ds Max. I began first with a lawn-grass type, and then added more tall grass, some flowers, the bushes and finally the trees, and I composited them using the Forest Pack painting tool.

Adding the vegetation to the image

Camera setup

For the camera setup, I usually do a few different cameras and I test it to see what the best camera angle for the image and final composition will be. Finally, I opted for the camera shown below because it was the best option for what I had in mind for my composition.

I used this camera angle for my final render

Lighting

For the lighting I used a V-Ray Dome light with HDRI, with the VRayCamera. The following three images show my settings.

The scene I will be lighting

Some of the settings used in V-Ray

More settings for the camera

Render setup

For the rendering I like to choose all the passes that I will need use to do the post-production. The render settings are also shown below. After 6 hours of rendering, I then had the raw render, ready for me to start the post-production.

These are the settings for the passes I use in post-production

These are the render settings I used

The raw render, ready for post-production

Post-production

This was the final stage and the most important, because it was where I could fix some render errors and get the final desired look.

The final version of Silent House

Top tip: atmosphere and ambience

One the most important things is to get a good atmosphere into your image. In 3ds Max, I created the volumetric light and fog with the VRayEnvironmentFog, because for this image I want cool sun rays coming through the trees, and a morning fog effect, as you see in the V-Ray environment pass here. 

Creating atmosphere and ambience