Ronen Bekerman is an industry leader in Architectural Visualization who hosts in-depth tutorials on his specialist blog. Architizer is pleased to present a selection of these guides written by some of the world’s best rendering artists.
Giona Andreani does virtual photographs of not-yet-built architecture. He is passionate about technology, science fiction, mountain biking and, particularly, analog photography, which allows him to log off from the hyper-technological and frantic world to which we are connected every day. He works in the field of architectural visualization with a Master’s degree in Architectural Visualization from State of Art Academy and a degree in environmental architecture from “Politecnico di Milano.”
Today, Andreani gives us a glimpse behind the scenes of his modeling and rendering process for a stunning modern residence in Italy. It’s not too long so should be an easy read with room for questions to be asked — so please do!
Introduction
My latest images are visualizations of a residential project by Scandurra Studio Architettura at Paratico near Iseo Lake, Italy.
For this work, I decided to recreate the entire environment in 3D. During the process, I switched from V-Ray to Corona Renderer to try it on a production work.
In this making-of, I will focus on the landscape because it was the most important and detailed part of the scene.
Environment
Because the project area was quite big, I had to optimize the scattering of vegetation, keeping in mind the vantage points I have decided on.
I used MultiScatter for the general distribution of vegetation and MultiPainter to add more details in places directly seen by the cameras.
Overview of the scene:
Here’s an example of the targeted distribution of trees, bushes and ground-cover plants:
Some 3D trees are from Evermotion, others from free resources found on Ronen’s Blog by Andrei Mikhalenkov. The grass and bushes are from iCube R&D.
Here is a crop from another image of the project showing the scattered grass with different layers of grass and flowers.
The lake surface is a simple plane with a water material and a displacement map applied. I used the procedural OceanTex map from the plug-in Phoenix FD, tuned to achieve a quiet, calm water.
This map works perfectly with Corona Renderer, too!
In this scene, lighting is really basic and simple.
The daylight render was made with Corona. I switched from V-Ray because I wanted to try this new render engine, and I discovered it is very powerful and a lot faster than V-Ray for this scene.
I used a Corona Sun and Corona Plane Lights inside of the house.
For the night view, rendered with V-Ray, I placed a V-Ray Dome Light with an evening HDRI map from Peter Guthrie’s Collection:
Interiors are lit with simple V-Ray plane lights:
Rendering
Daylight view setup – Corona:
Night view setup – V-Ray:
I used the Corona Renderer converter script to export all materials and lighting from V-Ray. It worked really well. Only the leaves materials needed to be retouched slightly.
I copied the diffuse texture into the Translucency slot and tuned the fraction level to achieve a good balance. A value between 0,15 to 0,3 worked well for me.
Post-Production
Photoshop work was very limited on these images; the daylight image has a really simple post-production, just some curves and color correction on the leaves and z-depth pass for the fog.
For the night shot, I blurred the sky and the reflections on the water a little, simulating a long exposure. I tuned the contrast a bit and applied a slight glow to the highlights. I also applied a subtle mist effect using the z-depth pass.
Composition
To conclude, I want to explain the composition chosen for these two images.
The single house on the lake is architecturally symmetrical, so I decided to emphasize this concept using the reflective water plane.
I went for a panoramic ratio 2:1 and a night mood for the overview of the entire complex. Through the interior lights, it is possible to understand the main concept of the project; the apartments appear behind the trees, giving a pixelated effect to the architecture.
That’s all!
Here you can find additional images I made for this project.
I hope you found this simple making-of interesting and useful. I’ll be happy to answer any question you may have.
Thanks for reading,
Giona
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This article first appeared on Ronen Bekerman.