Making-of Smith House

Article written by Konstantinos Anninos.

Making-of Smith House

Hello my friends, I am Konstantinos Anninos (aka annkos) and I’m going to share with you my workflow of the Smith house project. I used 3D Max and Vray for rendering, for post-processing work I always use Photoshop.

Introduction

First of all, I would like to mention that Smith house is an amazing house designed by the great Architect Richard Meier. I didn’t try to make the exactly same environment, but to add my thoughts and ideas to the house as well – especially in the interior. So let’s start!

General settings

Nothing new to mention here, I use gamma 2,2 with standard 3DS Max render window and Centimeters for units.

Modeling

I downloaded the basic Smith house 3D model from greatbuildings.com, but I made a lot of corrections (we can even say I rebuilt it) as the model had a lot of faults. After that, I used Ivy generator and from Peter Guthrie’s grass tutorial I modeled some grass blades that were scattered with Itoo Forest pack. Trees are from Archmodels collections and also I downloaded some interior furniture from bebitalia.it. A lot of people asked me some questions about grass and ground, so I want to give You some tips about them.

Actually my ground has 3 layers that gives more realism to the scene. First layer is the basic soil ground for which I used a V-Ray displacement with small amount, then the second layer is some dry ivy to give my ground some wood sticks from the ground and the third layer is the grass itself, but I have to mention that I left some spaces between the grass so I can show the ground and ivy. You can see my scatter settings in the image.

Grass settings:

Ivy overview:

Interior furniture:

Exterior camera:

Interior camera:

Texturing

Nothing special here, just my basic workflow that contains diffuse, reflect, bump and displacement sometimes. Here are some examples.

Grass material:

Soil Material:

Wall material:

Lighting

For the lighting, I used HDRI in Dome + V-Ray Sun for both exterior and interior lighting, but for interior render the Sun and dome were rotated a bit to get more lighting inside. I downloaded HDRI for free from here hdrlabs.com.

Render settings

I used very basic settings in V-Ray, check them out here:

Post Process

As always, I give a lot of time to post process until I am happy with the result. As my standard workflow I use Nik software, Magic Bullets and I add some chromatic aberration, vignetting, sharpen and selective colors tools. You can see some of my technics in an older video I’ve created some time ago:

Now back to the article:

This is the postproduction I used for this project:

And that’s it! I hope my tutorial gives you some good information. Thanks for watching and for sharing as well!

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