It all started with trees and shrubs. Inspired by our own garden in the English countryside I created a green place to relax in. The air is a bit moist and you can still see some fog in the bushes but you can tell it is going to be a glorious day.

Lighting

I created the scene in 3ds max and rendered it with vray. The exterior lighting is done with vray sun and sky. For some of the images I increased the vray sun multiplier to soften the shadows a little. I enjoy the simplicity of this approach, currently I prefer it over HDRI for all good weather exteriors.
I placed the sun behind the building which meant the main pergola does not get too much light. I found the shadows created by the pergola and the reflection of the surroundings in the windows made it worthwhile.

Environment creation

I very much enjoy working with Forest Pack, Railclone and Laubwerk, here they made the creation of the building, garden and close neighbourhood of “Michael and Emma’s Place” more fun and efficient.

With the exception of the pink ornamental grass and the grass, all plants are models from Laubwerk’s beautiful plant kits. Most of them are scattered with Itoo Forest Pack Pro but I planted some trees and plants manually into my scene. A plane with high subdivisions and a noise modifier serves as surface for the grass object. The pebble and shrubs forest pack objects surrounding the building use their own plane surface which I edited using the freeform tools in 3ds max. I find the exclude options in the properties of the forest pack area very useful to, for example, prevent pebbles from protruding into the stepping stones.

In my work I often use Railclone to quickly create environment geometry. Thanks to the new additions to its library which happened to be a good fit for my project, I was able to use Railclone for a quick cladding of the main building as well. For that I used a new Railclone Object utilising a spline that I created by selecting the outer edges of the building.

The neighbourhood buildings which are mostly hidden by vegetation and did not need a lot of detail were created with splines and Railclone objects for wall, roof and guttering. The fence in the back of the garden is done with Railclone as well.