Bertrand Benoit (BBB3)

[isucur]

Beautiful stuff you got here BBB3, from the beginning your posts are "eyecandy". Displaced rocks are impressive, grass too, but the only thingy i dislike in your test renders are smoking factories in background ...

Keep on rockin' man!!

[tolas]

Really nice work so far. I'd clone out that chimney stack from horizon

[VukDjordjevic]

Great so far! A lot of details are coming out in this work its gonna be a blast!

[Deetee]

love ur idea and rendering. especially the rocks and grass.

[BBB3]

Thanks a lot for the encouragements and the kind words, guys. Very much hope to finish this one.

Though I'm not finished with the environment, I decided to make a start on texturing this baby.

First thing I did was make a clean scene with just the house and split it into selection groups corresponding to the various materials I would be using. I also separated these groups into several layers to ease the job (the "cast iron" group below).

I then assigned different materials with placeholder diffuse colours to get a better sense of how the house would split into different groups/elements (see colour-coded house below)

[tricky]

It is a bit of a pain to receive a model with no naming at all - just Mesh1..Mesh234 etc. Oh well, at least it seems nice and clean.

Out of interest, I imported the 3ds file into max. Will vray glass-type textures work with the windows (in the sense of 'thickness')? I need to check if the geometry has come in as massless planes or volumes through which vray reflection/refraction can work its magic.

[bakbek]

It is a bit of a pain to receive a model with no naming at all - just Mesh1..Mesh234 etc. Oh well, at least it seems nice and clean.

Out of interest, I imported the 3ds file into max. Will vray glass-type textures work with the windows (in the sense of 'thickness')? I need to check if the geometry has come in as massless planes or volumes through which vray reflection/refraction can work its magic.

All glass panes have thickness, I had you all in mind with this... usually in SketchUP i just model the glass as single planes and add the shell modifier in 3dsmax - but for this one a went double from the start.

About the naming... I personally never needed that - but i will take this into account for future challenges.

[BBB3]

... then I began the texturing, starting with building a high-res timber boarding texture from scratch using images from CGTextures and based this on some of the reference photos kindly provided by Peter and Ronen.

I also played around quite a bit with the geometry. Although the model is very clean, I thought I had to do some work on it to facilitate the texturing and more easily add details later. The various changes included:

- Removing the blinds (too Mediterranean for my Scandinavian climate).
- Merging some of the different pieces into one bigger object (for instance the wood board cladding is one object).
- Merging vertices to facilitate UV unwrapping and allow me to use the VrayEdgeTex as bump on some objects.
- Change tris and ngons to quads to allow further detailing with edge loop and, in some cases, mesh-smoothing.
- Adding bevels on some edges that looked too sharp (for instance the concrete parts).
- Adding extra details that are dictated by the choice of material (for example additional planks and edges for the boarding that initially looked too flat; adding protective tin plates to the window sills and roofs, since it's quite rainy over there and you don't want this nice wood to go to waste...)
- Instead of using standard UV-mapping, I decided to unwrap the model to allow for more precision and to make it easier to paint wear-and-tear to the materials later (not yet done in the images below).

One important step was to add double-glazing everywhere because: 1) it makes sense given the climate, 2) It gives these really nice double reflections that add that extra bit of realism.

For the glass material of the window, I added a noise map in the bump slot to gently curve the reflection. This is a popular workflow, but you can make it even more convincing by ensuring that the noise map is not the same on every window, otherwise the curved reflection will transition too neatly from one window to the next, as though they were made of one solid piece of glass. One way around this is to assign 2 or 3 mat ids to different window panes and apply copies of the same material with different noise maps (actually the same noise map copied several times but with a different phase for each) to these different IDs.
This and the double glazing might sound like overkill, especially for the distant shot, but it's the kind of thing that can make the difference in close-ups and interiors.

One last step in this session was to do the wood deck outside. For this, I used two great free tools from CGsource: Floor Generator and MultiTextureMap.

Floor Generator creates a custom parquet object within a spline while MultiTextureMap assigns random texture maps from a list to each individual plank.

This is a great tool that I use all the time to create my parquet. The result is quite a dense mesh, but it has several amazing advantages over using textures: There is no visible tiling of the planks regardless of the area covered and at the same time, you can get as close to the planks as you want without losing details or getting a pixelated image. And since the floor is actual geometry, it is sharper, better-looking, and easier on your system than displacement. Floor Generator also allows you to give your planks random tilt and rotation values, which is great for older, slightly disjointed parquets. I will use it too for my interior with different maps. Finally, because it draws the floor within a spline, you can make the surface as complex as you like (for instance, I cut two round holes in my deck for the two pillars outside to go through).

That's it for now. Sorry for the very long post, but I thought some of these details about my workflow (not quite fancy enough to call them trade secrets) might be of interest to others. Here are the images. Still quite a lot of texturing work to do.

[BBB3]

Sorry guys, I didn't see your posts before posting the message above.

Yes, the glass has thickness, which was a huge time-saver, though I had to make the panes a bit thinner in my case to accomodate the double glazing.

I'm planning to post some details about my materials when I'm done with the texturing.

[robert]

Very nice materials, the wood looks great and I thought the rocky setting was an actual photo in the last image!

[StompinTom]

Bastard! I had a similar idea when I first read the brief! Good to see you around again, you haven't been around the Blender or Indigo/Lux forums in forever. Hows 3ds max treating you?

The images look great, especially the rock and the grass, some top notch stuff there, bud!

[BBB3]

Thanks a lot Robert.

Hey Tom, nice to see you too! No, I've deserted Indigo for the time being. But I did get a licence so I will revisit it as soon as I find some time.
I hope our Australian friends are keeping you busy.