Making of House at Paros

Dimitris Batis shares valuable insight about creating a Mediterranean Style scene based on his Paros Homes project. In this short article he will focus on the walls modeling and material, rocks and general lighting creation.

I found these Paros images so captivating and capturing the Greek island feel so well, I asked Dimitris to share a few quick and focused tips about these scene. It is not the usual in-depth making of article, but good grounds for starting a discussion about it and giving you the chance to ask more about the work that was done here so well.

Enjoy!

Author: Dimitris Batis

We were commissioned by “Paros Home Constructions”, a construction company in Greece, to make 3d photorealistic presentation of a traditional residence, in the beautiful island of Paros, in Cyclades, Greece.

 

paros-01.jpg

This particular project was a bit odd in that the plot of the residence was located far away from the sea. For this reason, we decided for the 3d images to focus more on the building than the views from the building on its surroundings. A view that every house – in an island – could have had.

The project was also challenging from two other points of view. The first is that the photorealistic presentation had to be extremely realistic in order to match the commercial needs of the project.

 

paros-mood-board

The second challenge for us was to achieve depicting the feel of a traditional Cycladic house, without having an idyllic horizon and a spectacular view of the Aegean sea. You can see some of the look and feel of the place in the mood board up above.

Generally speaking, I think that we managed to deal with these difficulties successfully. The 3d application gave us the ability to achieve the environmental planting of the building plot as well as the building technique method of construction which was one of the most difficult parts of the project.

Image_02.jpg

Last but not least, an equally important aspect of the project for me was the lighting. The images had to be realistic enough to capture the feeling of a traditional Cycladic house in the heat of a summer’s day, under the beautiful blue sky at noon. I believe that the final result shaped this familiar image to all of us, the Greek people.

Image_03.jpg

Modeling

1. Creation of Traditional Realistic Masonry

An important part of the modeling was to realistically present the masonry of the project. This must not have sharp corners but quite smooth ones with embossed surfaces.

paros_Image_01.jpg

I started with a very simple box model of the shell walls, with properly positioned basic edge loops… derived from all the corners and holes intersections.

paros_Image_02.jpg

More edge loop were introduced into the model to allow for a proper smoothing process of the mesh.

paros_Image_03.jpg

The Turbo Smooth Modifier made it easy for us to handle the geometry bringing it exactly where we wanted. A disadvantage was that a lot of polygons were produced but we got over this with the iso-line display.

paros_Image_04.jpg

Finally, we used a noise modifier to create uneven shapes on the masonry.

paros_Image_05.jpg

2. The Fence of the Compound

In the same way, we dealt with the fences on the project’s perimeter. The bottom of the fence is simple geometry with a subdivide and a VRayDisplacement modifier to adjust the stone’s texture while the upper part, the top of the fence, had to look more molten and embossed and embrace the fence.

paros_Image_06.jpg

Environment

1. Rocks

I used the Rock Generator Script by Alessandro Ardolino to make the rocks in my scene.

paros_Image_07.jpg

Alessandro created this great script being inspired by a great tutorial by Sasha Henrichs published on Autodesk AREA and embedded here too.

You can also learn more about rock creation by following Daniel Hatton’s Realistic Rock Creation Tutorial Part 1

realistic-rocks-tutorial-daniel-hatton-part-1-preview

And Realistic Rock Creation Part 2

realistic-rocks-tutorial-daniel-hatton-part-2-preview

2. Scatter

To produce my grass I used the MultiScatter plugin which facilitated its management…creating a variety of grass with both dry and green kinds, various bushes and short trees resembling the ones that are in the project’s area but also for the depiction of summer in Greece.

paros_Images_09.jpg

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Textures

1. Walls

The most difficult material to depict was that of the wall. We had to create a clean white color that suits the style of the region, but one that will not “washout” and have the little imperfections such wall surfaces have.

You can se the diffuse and the map we used for both bump and reflections below… as well as the general material settings.

paros_attachment.jpg

paros_attachment_01.jpg

2. Stones

We had to stress the joints of the stone which constitute the fence and we achieved that by using the displace maps in Photoshop.

paros_Image_10.jpg

Another approach to this would be to use the Stone Placement Tool Script by Alessandro Ardolino to build such a stone wall from actual geometry. I didn’t have these walls near camera too much, so the texturing solution worked pretty well.

Lighting

To depict the lighting we used an EXR file made by Peter Guthrie (EXR 1224).

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By combining a VRaySun and VRay Dome Light we were able to show the summer’s midday sun in Greece.

paros_Image_11.jpg

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Render

The final renders were meant to be in a commercial handout thus the resolution had to be high in 3508 x 2480 pixels. Being pressured by time, the render resolution had to be done quickly without too much impact on the quality of the images.

paros_Image_15a.jpg

That’s it!

I hope this short article offered you some insight into my work and that it will help you, even if little, in your own work.

Cheers,

Batis.

23 replies
  1. max3dvi
    max3dvi says:

    realy nice tutorial
    can you post your test setting for the render (the one you use when you are tring light and texture
    thanks

  2. Dollmaker
    Dollmaker says:

    Thank you Your images looks photo real 🙂 Could you post your camera settings? and could you be kind enough to tell me what grass and bushes you have used? Thanks 😉

    • Batis Dimitris
      Batis Dimitris says:

       @Dollmaker I used grass from ICube with multiscatter and the bushes also
      but changing a lot the materials.

  3. ThomasGruender
    ThomasGruender says:

    very nice!can you tell us about rendertime and what you’ve done in the postthx from berln
     

    • Batis Dimitris
      Batis Dimitris says:

       @ThomasGruender The render time was about 3 hours for each image.For  post i used ps for basic color correction (used curves and color balance). 
       

  4. ShimonSundruci
    ShimonSundruci says:

    i Love it! thank you very much Ronen for all theTutorials that u make.always happy to see more like this one (the Modeling Part)

    • Batis Dimitris
      Batis Dimitris says:

       @BrunoDaSilva I used Vray Physical camera with default settings except
      the Day Light as white balance.

  5. EduardoFeliu
    EduardoFeliu says:

    I LIKE THIS WORK AS MUCH AS DESIGN LIKE RENDERING NOW YOU WANT TO KNOW AS IT WAS THE CAMERA THAT THEY USED

  6. samanoski
    samanoski says:

    hi, how you can use both sun shadow and hdri shadow ? you use hdri as envirenment and reflection texture ? and you adapt the sun oriention to hdri sun ? excuse may englih 🙂 

  7. leel0u
    leel0u says:

    hi great work thank’s for sharing . Over all your vegetables feel greats! May you share other information? how many type of species are here, in tot. how many istances populate your immages….rendered with how much memory….and so on. Thank’s in advance

  8. anwar522
    anwar522 says:

    Simple and quite Neat Project 🙂 Love the Cactus though 😛 
    Well Ronen , 
    it would be really helpful if you could please make a Thread on Some Everyday useful Scripts for Interior & Exterior Renderings . Like StoneGenerator Scripts , Floor generator & Etc 🙂 
     
    Would be really appreciated 🙂 

  9. vaslavo
    vaslavo says:

    thos images are perfect specially the illumination, i saw something about the materials of the grass, i have the same ones but dont use them because hte materials, could you share some of the changes that worked for u?

  10. vaslavo
    vaslavo says:

    those renders are great, specially the illumination, i have iqube grass too but dont use themb because the materials, ive read about you change them, colud you give som clues abut that? tnks

  11. AlfonsoLopez
    AlfonsoLopez says:

    Nice Work and good tutoria 🙂
    can i ask you something?
    shrubs in the scene, you did or did you get some library?
    I am very interested especially those who are on the outside of the property,
    I live in a desert with vegetation like that.

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