A project from earlier this year that I reworked a bit. Added some more props and lighting and other things I didn’t get time to do previously. The photos are some of my favourite ones from my Dad’s portfolio, and winter themed as the first snow has just started to fall here in Sweden.
As usual, the renders are more or less as they were directly from vray, just added some glows to the lights.
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:
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:
The vray override material is a great way of previewing/checking your lighting even when you are a long way into a project. The scene below uses a homemade dusk HDR skydome and vrayIES internal lights which have a colour temperature of 4500 (6000 in the second image) kelvin. I wanted to check the effect 2 alternative IES web files made to the internal lighting in distribution as well as the fancy patterns on the walls. I find having all the materials a neutral colour really helps in balancing natural & artificial light.
To set it up, you first make a mid grey material in the material editor and then drag it into the vray override mtl slot in global switches (in this instance I made a material called ‘200′ which has the rgb values 200,200,200):
then you can specify which objects to exclude from the override material (normally glass) in the include/exclude dialog:
This is a quick tutorial to show how I add extra details to the edges of surfaces. In this scene, I wanted to make the hard edges of the concrete appear rougher and less uniform. Vray comes with a map called a vrayedgestex map that you would normally use to make wireframe materials (eg hidden line renders). It can also be used as a bump map to give the illusion of rounded edges.
In the 3 examples below, I have applied a vrayedgestex (red for clarity) to the diffuse channel of a grey material, the second is a black and white noise map, and in the third I have combined the two by using a vraycomptex map. The vraycomptex map is set to multiply which gives the effect of breaking up the otherwise smooth red line around all the edges of the table. Setting the vraycomptex to multiply is like blending modes in Photoshop, and about as easy to understand - I recommend experimenting with the various modes till you get a feeling for what each do.
In the animated gif, 1 is a render without any bump map, 2 is with just vrayedgestex and 3 is the final result.
So in the material editor, at the top I have a vraycomptex in the bump slot called ‘edge01′ which adds together the next vraycomptex ‘edge02′ and the standard bitmap bump jpg for the concrete material. ‘edge02′ is the one that multiplies together the vrayedgestex map and the noise map. You should set the vrayedgestex to white, and change it to world units. I work in millimeters so 2.5 was about right. You can then play about with different types of noise maps, but the settings I have above worked well for concrete.