Introduction

Hey all, I’d like to start and thank Ronen for having me here, sharing my knowledge of VRayForC4D in creating House Roces.

SOFTWARE USED

• ArchiCAD 14
• Cinema4D
• VrayForC4D 1.2.6
• OnyxTree
• Photoshop
• Lightroom

The Roces House

Let’s start with seeing the final renders I made in this project before we get started…

You can see more of this house on Archdaily – House Roces / Govaert & Vanhoutte architectuurburo but here are some photos I used as reference here too…

Modeling

Getting good references and study your subject is vital in getting the results you look for your renders. I found a couple of photos of the actual built house as well as sections, elevations and floor plans on Archdaily as shown above.

I used ArchiCAD 14 to create the base mesh that was further detailed later in Cinema4D where I softened the model by beveling sharp edges, etc.

Why ArchiCAD you ask?

It is very user-friendly and has ready-made elements such as walls, windows, doors. etc. which are editable using pre-defined parameters instead of modeling them from scratch. The wall tool for example is very fast to use and allows full control over the geometry.

The window tool allowed me to create custom widths and heights and I took care of all the extra details needed later… inside Cinema4D.

Below is the model inside ArchiCAD viewport…

And after export, inside Cinema4D…

First thing I did before starting further work was to turn off C4D LWF and set the input color profile to sRGB.

Vegetation

The conifer trees were modeled using Onyx TREE CONIFER 7. Pretty straight forward basic Onyx workflow. I won’t go into the specifics of it at this stage.

I obtained the yellow dandelions from the high quality grass selection by 3dmentor’s HQ Plants and Grass, and all the vegetation was scattered using a plugin called SurfaceSpread – made by C4D-Jack, I couldn’t do this scene without it. It helped with the natural scattering of vegetation around the scene.

First step was to create a SurfaceSpread tag via the plugins tab in C4D. Then, make a child for the grass scatter in it. Then, starting to assign it to a plane / surface object. Once done, I made sure the editor weight was set to 10% in the general tab.

After this I went to the effects tab, where I set a random scale and rotate for the scattered elements.

That’s it for SurfaceSpread… very simple!

The rest of the shrubs were created by the user-friendly Onyx Grass application.

Below you can see and overview of the model with all the scattered elements displayed as boxes for saving on-screen update resources.

Texture & Materials

I got most of my textures from the great Arroway Textures collection.

Concrete Material

They have great concrete textures. You can see a setup for it below…

The Diffuse

The Bump

The Specular

Steel Material

The steel material was very simple…nothing special about it. See below the material set up for it.

The Diffuse

The Specular

Glass Material

I just used IOR values in the Specular Channel.

The Specular

The Refraction

Grass Material

I used a texture I found online for the grass blades. After Creating the material I inserted it into a 2 Sided material. And that goes for the rest of the vegetation materials.

The Diffuse

The Specular

The Refraction

The Bump

Lighting & Camera

You can see an overview of the lights in the scene below…

I find lighting setup to be most important to the scene. I mostly use HDRI for general lighting because it gives me sharper shadows and a much nicer atmosphere.

Camera settings

A lot of people asked me about my lighting so I made a short making of it for Peter Guthrie’s blog, but I’ll go over it here too…

I used Peter’s HDRI 1941 dusk blue for this scene.

First step in creating the light is to make a VRayDome Light. The steps I used are :

1. Create cinema 4d Area light.
   2.  Add VRayLight tag to it.
2. Set the intensity to 1.6.

1. Go to Area Light tab and set the Area type to Dome.

1. Add your HDRI in the texture slot and set the color profile to sRGB.

1. Insert the HDRI in a Filter shader and set the gamma to 0.75 or 0.8 (This is for getting sharp shadows. See Bertrand Benoit’s explanation for that).

For all the interior lighting I used IES files as it gives me the quality of light distribution I look for.

Rendering

Nothing special about the rendering settings for this scene. I used Brute Force (BF) and Light Cache (LC) for Global Illumination (GI) calculation. I rendered the images at 3200 pixels wide. I don´t have a big machine, so optimization is what I do most. rendering times went around 4 to 5 hours.

Here are my render settings…

Post Production

For postwork I used Adobe Lightroom. First some basic color correction and gradient filter to bring out the blue sky some more. I also took down the gamma and gave it more contrast.

I added a mist layer and used screen mode to overlay it, setting opacity to 25%.

After that I added some Chromatic Abbreviation in Lens Corrections.

And that is it for post production! Nothing special really, considering the depth others went into in past making-of articles.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and find something new or interesting to add to your workflow… Feel free to ask away using the comment section below about anything you like or something I might have missed.

Regards,

Mouton.