Lake Lugano House

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I first came across the Lake Lugano House when I saw the visuals done by James Pickford back in 2012. I had never worked on an exterior scene before so decided to have a crack at it myself.

I found some plan views of the house online and recreated them in AutoCAD to import into 3ds max. Using these and various reference images I was able to model the entire house and surrounding area. I rendered the initial visuals using forest pack and vray and having only worked on it during my lunch breaks it took me a couple of months.

I recently found those visuals when cleaning out my hard drive and decided they needed revisiting. I cleaned up the entire model and mapped everything properly. I added a new lighting setup, recreated all the materials and updated all the forest objects. I was also fortunate enough to find a high res panorama image of Lake Lugano itself which is a massive feature of the final images.

It took me about a month to complete, again working on it during my lunch hour every now and then. The final images were rendered using vray with a fair bit of post in photoshop.

COUNTRY HOUSE

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This image was made for the purpose of testing procedural ecosystems.

At the same time I wanted to convey the idea that the strong lines and the dark colors of the brutalist architecture can blend well with the chromatic scale of the typical Mediterranean forest.

The building and the ground were modeled in 3ds MAX; the lawn, the trees and the gravel have been inserted using Forest Pack.

The lighting was done with the use of a high resolution HDRI and sunlight; the lights were filtered with a slight fog effect.

The images were rendered with Corona, the lightmix option to adjust the contrast between HDRI and sunlight was very useful.

Lake House

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The house is planned to be a 1 level construction and the main desire is to catch the views from the lake, in order to achieve that, the site was needed to be elevated approximately 9 feet above the initial level. The materials and finishes in this project are mainly from the area and a certain balance is always taken in consideration. High ceilings, open spaces and great views are few of the qualities of the house.

Country Home V2

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Country Home V2 is an R&D project I embarked on personally. It is a revisit of an old project we did last year (View old scene here). I decided to recreate the scenes of the project and so placed the design in a more natural environment. The environment was influenced by one of NMachine’s projects – LM Guest House. The simple design of the home alongside the mood of the renders was one to greatly admire and I sought to recreate that sort of ambiance and realism.

The project was worked on in my free time between commercial projects and like I prefer doing, I emphasized on creating a full CGI environment. I have listed links to the resources I used in this simulation.

Country Home V2 project was rendered in Corona, an amazingly forward thinking renderer. It made my workflow almost seamless and I never had to worry about tweaking render settings or what’s not.