Bertrand Benoit (BBB3)

[BBB3]

I'm in! Looking forward to seeing the model.

EDITED: Here are my finals. I haven't submitted extra images since I'm on the road now and can't re-render. So that'll be it for me. It was great fun doing this. Good luck to all.

[bakbek]

Hi Bertrand,

Good to see you here, and looking forward to see what you come up with!

[soulofsound]

OMG Bertrand, you're here!

I'm so looking forward to see your renders!

I hope your endeavours in Max are working out. I will post only Blender work here.

[BBB3]

Hey, nice to see you too. Looking forward to seeing your Blender output. I'll have some preliminary stuff to show tomorrow, I hope.

Hi Ronen. Great initiative you had here! I love the house too!

[BBB3]

Ok, I've made a start. I hope this post won't be too long, but I've spent a few hours on this project last night and I've got quite a few things to show. I'll try to break things in successive posts so that the images are not all stuck at the end.

First with the concept. My idea was to transpose this house from its original context in a warm, sunny country to the chilly coast of Norway. This is basically an excuse to do lots of rocks, something I've been curious about doing for some time and never had an opportunity to. I think Scandinavia at the onset of autumn or winter, when days become shorter, can make for an interesting light situation. This may require a few adjustments to the house. For instance, the blinds are currently perfect for a sunny warm country but they don't make sense for Scandinavia, where you can't get enough light in. So I'll swap those for light curtains. I hope I'm not crossing a red line here, but I expect Ronen will stop me if I do.

I'm planning to try and get the exterior into a reasonable shape before moving to the house, and then the interior as the last step. So let's start with a few concept ideas for the landscaping. I want to put the GH House on a rocky promontory. There will be some height, although generally speaking, the scene will be relatively low-lying and relatively close to the water. Here are a few references I'll be looking at when working on the landscape and vegetation:

[BBB3]

Before getting started on any modelling, I wanted to try and get the illumination close to what I want it to be. The idea there is to try and create an early morning feel, with a partly cloudy sky and the kind of grazing pink sunlight one gets at these high latitudes when the sun is low and its light goes through a thick atmospheric layer before landing on the landscape. I like this combination of deep blue general illumination and pink light and it should work well with some warm interior lighting in the house. There's a nice cold-warm contrast in this scenario, although the idea is to evoke chilliness.

This is not a specific condition I can control very well when using Vray's SunSky system (I'm working in Max 2010 and Vray SP4, by the way). So I'm going to use a coloured direct light in place of the sun and an HDRI for the illumination. I'm also using area shadows for the sun to soften them a bit.

Here's what I'm talking about. This is a clay model, plain grey. All the colour comes from the lighting. The sky is a panoramic jpg from CGTextures and a placeholder for the moment. It will be replaced with a higher-res image plane for the final:

[BBB3]

Now to some early concepts of what the rocks could look like.
I'm also attaching lo-res versions of my maps (diffuse, displace and specular). These were done from CGTexture rock photos. An important step here, beyond making them tileable and extracting the displace/specular maps, was to match their colours to make sure they sit coherently together in the landscape. The maps are square to allow for easy UV mapping.

[BBB3]

Now to some modelling.

This shows the rough volumes of the initial rocks. I haven't done anything to the house model at this stage beyond removing the perimeter wall. The entire landscaping will be removed later and accomodated to the landscape, although the footprint will remain roughly the same.

[BBB3]

The same rocks, plus a few more (there will be more, especially smaller ones, in the final scene). I'm trying to use the stratas to give a degree of rythm to the image, accentuating the horizontal lines that will contrast with the mostly vertical lines of the house, although I've slightly tilted the map to break the strict horizontal scheme a little and give the whole a more organic feel.

The images show various states of progress. The final image includes a few more rocks, improved water (displacement using a mixture of bitmap and procedurals), and some wetness added at the base of the rocks (I'm using a VrayBlendMat with a black and white map as a mask to create the transition between the dry rock and the wet rock materials).

The POV is what I have in mind for the final exterior image, although the cropping may be slightly different. I want a strongly horizontal format to fit the composition, with the horizon line in the bottom third of the image.

[BBB3]

That'll be all for today. As I said, I will try to get the landscape into a reasonable shape before I get down to the house (I'm thinking about breaking the transition between the promontory and the water to "ground" the rocks a bit more).

On the house, I want to use a mixture of weathered timber cladding and concrete that will stress the verticals. The general mix should be wood, concrete, glass and steel, with maybe the odd bit of rusted metal to match the rock's colour.

[peterguthrie]

wow, impressive start!

I was just going to point you in the direction of another similar scandinavian house: http://www.belowtheclouds.com/2008/0...ge-arkitekter/

and something a bit different in sweden but maybe similar in mood: http://www.nbruun.dk/akvarell-01.htm

[BBB3]

Hi Peter. Thanks for dropping by.
These refs are great. I'll add them to my folder. The cladding on the first one is very close to what I had in mind for the house. But I must say I also very much like the darker, more muted version in the second one. These are exactly along the lines I'm trying to follow here.