Looking For Feedback/Critique On some Exterior Renderings Max/Vray

[jasonstewart]

Hello everyone,

I have recently switched to Vray and I am loving it so far although it has taken some adjustment from MentalRay. Unfortunately I dont get to render as much as I would like (I mostly work as a designer working on the design and we only render when the city/town requires it for the most part) but I think I am making progress. I really enjoy rendering and I think I may start to steer my career more in that direction.

 

Anyways, enough about me. Here are my two most recent renderings. I am hoping that you guys can give me some advice on what I should work on in the future and some tips to get some more realism. Both were done as quickly as possible, the first one took me about 12 hours start to finish and the second one took me about 10.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Scott Schroeder]

Your models/textures are pretty solid. What is hurting your realism is your lighting and landscape. You need to look into why your grass is 100% flat. Your flax plants are way too green as well. The flowering bushes look the best of all your landscape. You also should wrap the landscape around the left corner of your stucco home. It looks like either nothing grows on that side or the landscaper forgot to plant there. Also on your first render the rock in the foreground really doesn't make sense to me. Unless that house has a huge setback, I would think the street would be somewhere near there or at least just more grass. If you are going to keep that rock there, you might want to use geometry (or good displacement) rather than a bump as it is in the direct foreground.

 

Your lighting, in my opinion, needs to add contrast to your structures. Right now it just looks flat across the entire front side of the house. You can get that contrast by either getting some more defined shadows and/or adding in some brightness/contrast in post.

 

Mono texture homes are hard to render at times. If you have the ability to make design changes, can you break up the faces by adding in some trims? The stucco could have a stone/brick base going up to the bottom of the windows. The siding home maybe shouldn't be all siding. Maybe add in some stucco or masonry?

 

You have a good start on these, so just make a few change and they'll really pop.

[jasonstewart]

Hey, thanks a lot for the suggestions. I will have to give some of them a try.

 

Unfortunately I am unable to make changes to the buildings. On the stucco one we originality were showing some of the projecting elements as stone but the clients though it was too much and wanted it to be more plain, Actually they wanted to remove the window trims also but we told them that would be a bad idea, the town has to approve the design and they don't like buildings with no detail so we may end up with some stone after we get their comments back.

 

I was struggling with the gravel shader, I think it looks decent straight on to the camera but off to the right it looks strange. In this area most of the houses have gravel parking strips out front for guest parking as the street isn't wide enough for a car to park and traffic to flow, setback is 25' not including the parking strip as the first 6 or so off the street belong to the Town. I will have to look into some better solutions, while looking for a good texture I ran into Arroway's site and their stuff looks really good might be time to invest in some solid stuff like that.

 

I agree about the grass, it was done with vray fur and I did have a mix map as my material but maybe it wasnt enough. I might have to do some scattered vray proxies or something to get some more variation within the grass and give it some depth.

 

I was trying to minimize shadows, maybe that is a mistake. My lighting consists of a HDRI with a Vray Sun aligned and linked up to it for positioning. I turn down the intensity of the sun to .1 and bump the size up to 10-20 to get the softer shadows. I will have to play with those settings to give it a bit more variation.

 

I actually haven't post processed either of these, have to look for some good tutorials on workflows for that.

 

Thanks so much for the feedback.

[Scott Schroeder]

Any of the "Making Of" series on CGArchitect have really good post-processing tutorials. A sunset/golden hour rendering does indeed have soft shadows, but I think you went too soft to the point where you are losing some contact shadows that ground your elements. The home's form gets flattened out by the even lighting. Maybe move your sun father off to the side to enhance some of the shape of the home.

 

Could you move the camera in a bit closer and avoid the gravel all together? If you can't, then I would suggest using Forest Pro/Free to scatter geometry pebbles around. Forest Pro can also scatter around your grass proxy as well. You could also give the mulch plane under the trees a slight roundness to it. If you think about it, mulch isn't planted so hyper flat.

[christofferthulin]

As for the gravel, XOIO released a free gravel map pack with displacement. You should check that out!

[heni30]

The foreground trees of the smaller house image are way too symmetrical

 

You should look at pictures in magazines to see how photographers use composition to show off houses to best advantage