A detailed Sketchup model with low res textures. Go to pushpullbar for more images and to download. Or you can download it from drop.io but I don’t know how long that link will last.
October, 2009
Farnsworth House
by Mies van der Rohe
(Click on fullscreen icon to see them at 1600px)
Something I’ve been working on for the best part of the last year (I previously blogged about the trees in… May, and the grass even before that!). Unfortunately paid work keeps getting in the way, I’m yet to figure out a solution to that problem.
I’m planning a tutorial on how I did the fog, (another) grass tutorial on how I did the mowed lawn and a making-of post summing up the whole process. Can also do one on optimizing the trees and making the tree materials if there is interest. The sketchup model of the house itself will be available on pushpullbar - details to follow in a separate post.
Technical Info:
- Grass (short, medium & long), clover and plantago major all scattered with vrayscatter as per previous tutorials.
- Trees are all made with Onyxtree. Species as per previous blog post.
- The total poly count comes to approx. 10 billion. 1.34 billion for trees, 8.4 billion for grasses, 270k for house, 550k for furniture.
- Renders took roughly 6 hrs each @ 2200px
- Rendered with vrayphysicalcamera, vraysun, HDRi environment
- VRayenvironmentfog was rendered as a separate pass and screened over in photoshop
- Final colour corrections made in Adobe Lightroom
Vray Dirt Tutorial
A quick tutorial on adding dirt to specific materials in Vray. A very useful application of the vraydirt shader in Vray is to make materials look dirty/weathered. Used in it’s basic form, with default settings, vraydirt can be used to add a general darkening around edges/corners in your 3d model. It can also be modified to affect only areas directly below 3d features.
a - Shows vraydirt using it’s default settings (dirt equal on all sides)
b - Shows vraydirt using settings to force the dirt to work only in a downward direction
c - As b, but with ‘invert normal’ ticked
d - b and c used within a vraycomptex map, set to minimum
By experimenting with the distribution, falloff and z-bias values, I managed to get the downward effect I was looking for (exact settings in screen grab below). I then combine 2 versions of the vraydirt map inside a vraycomptex map. The first version is for concave creases, the other for convex creases by ticking ‘invert normal’. The vraycomptex map is set to minimum so that it combines the two maps by always using the darkest rgb value.
Above is a render with a concrete material demonstrating the effect. In this case, the occluded map is the same as the unoccluded map but darker and with a slight rusty hue (achieved using a color correction map).
The diagram below shows how the material is made up, and shows the values I used:
To take this a step further, you could additionally add a map to vary the radius of the vraydirt effect. (Note that the value I used for radius is in mm)
And finally an animated gif showing renders with and without the vraydirt:
