Making of Maison Hermes

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Roberto De Rose from State of Art studio posted his great ‘Maison Hermes’ image at the forum not long ago. I was very impressed with that 3d rendering of Renzo Piano’s building and asked him to share with us how he created it. I hope you’ll enjoy this article and learn from it as much as I did!

Introduction.

Hi everyone, welcome to the Maison Hermes Making of. It’s difficult for me writing this because I worked without saving step by step information. All that I can show here is the workflow, models and how I get from the rendering to the final image. The actual 3d rendering process is less important since it is, for the most part, a painting job and it’s all about mixing channels.

Let’s start!

Reference Material

First of all, references!

I can’t make an artwork (dedicated to our favorite architects) without photos. Famous buildings have something magical about them and I need to understand where I can play with colors and lights to recreate that magic. On the other side it’s a matter of respect for the architect, i can’t make a mistake on proportions or materials. After watching a lot of photos, from various angles and at different time of the day I had an idea for the artwork’s final mood.

Maison Hermes References

Modeling & Lighting

The modeling stage was the easy part, just the 12,000+ glass-blocks gave me a little problem. I made a single mesh for the structure merging the linear 42,8cm glass-block with the 21,4cm angular one. The glass is a unique spline extruded and mapped with a noise to reproduce the distortions.

There are 9-12 spot lights on each floor, no HDRI, only a VRay sky with night settings. VRay lights are used on the slabs to improve the illumination. Street lights were made with a VRay light material. In the scene there are a lot of cubes mapped with textures of building to add reflections.

Top view of glass-block element

Glass-block structure

View of glass-block facade

The building in camera viewport

Materials & Rendering

3D Studio Max (3dsmax) & VRay were used to render out an A3 300dpi image (4960×3500). Render time was around 4 hours on a Dual Xeon 5550.

Materials are very simple. I made 3 different type of glass, one for the main structure, one for other buildings and a last one for the mirror effect of the palace at left. Street and pavement mats have a falloff in reflection, no bumps except for the normal map of red bricks.

Render Elements activated are raw-reflections, raw-refraction, diffuse and z-depth. Two Ambient occlusion passes were made, one fine with 40cm and one large with 500cm diameter. Just for fun, I rendered a pass of VRay sky with clouds… this is not really needed but give you some might be used later for making a background.

VRay Raw Reflections Pass

Glass material example

Post Processing

Finally, we can start with the most fun part of the job!

The photoshop file is 1.8 GB with dozens of post-production layers so I can’t show you every single step. Here’s the key points of the work.

Base render

Color corrections for dusk time

Starting to paint on render

Darkening image & adding the sky

Adding background, shops & car

Final Result

Just adding people, more lights and vegetation is left and then we have the final result as you can see below.

Adding people, lights and vegetation

Original Finished Work Thread

You are welcome to comment on this article and ask questions using the comment box below!

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