Home on the Gold Coast Qld Australia

[cgexperience]

This is a typical home you would find on the Gold Coast but in the well off areas of course, I had a lot of trouble modeling this home I couldn't basically see what I was doing because of display issues but later found the culprit was intersecting polys. Anyway I managed to pull it off blindfolded so to say. Hope you like.

[sandmanninja]

Hey mate,

For some reason, it looks like a model or toy house.
I think there some sort of scale issue going on that is making me think that.

What's the texture/material in front of the house?
It sort of looks like marble, but I'm guessing it's a driveway.

The palm trees are identicle - try randomising them a bit. Grab some branches and move them, alter the height of one, etc.

The bush/shrub in front looks okay, but the leaves look kinda too big.

The overall lighting looks too harsh/strong.

I'd put some furniture in the inside of the house - since we can look through the windows.

It looks like you're using Mental Ray's physical sky - which is fine. I like it.

I'd also adjust the camera to be eye level - might help the scale issue.

Most windows have a mirror effect when looking at them.
That can be controlled with the BRDF:

* BRDF
BiDirectional Reflectivity Distribution Function
This lets you control the reflection based on the angle of incidence of the viewer's eye.
0-degree reflection is looking directly at the surface
90-degree reflection is looking parallel to the surface
If you wanted to look directly THROUGH the glass, set the 0-degree reflection to 0
If you want to get reflection when you encounter a sharp angle, set the 90-degree reflection to 1
A Daytime scene would have a higher 0-degree reflection value than a night time scene
A Night time scene would not have much reflection and the 90-degree reflection would be lower

Curve Shape: adjusts the fall-off or the sharpness of the curve between the two values

Some custom BRDF settings:
Daytime, outside a building: 0.0, 1.0, 0.7
With the settings above, looking straight into the glass, it is still somewhat transparent but also reflective.
If you move the camera so that it's close to the glass and looking at about 75 or 80-degrees on the glass, it's practically a mirror.
Just imagine a wall of this material, stretching up to the sky...


Ex: Glass's reflectivity depends upon the light levels on either side of the pane of glass.
If you have a lot of light on the OUTSIDE of the building and not much light on the INSIDE, you tend to get a lot of reflection in the glass.
The opposite is true also.
If you were OUTSIDE the building at NIGHT with more light on the inside than the outside, there would be a lot of transparency.

and

* to get a nice, shiny, reflective glass (like a glass wall in an office building):
M -> pick a material slot -> A&D Materials -> Frosted Glass (Physical)
Diffuse and pick a colour
Drag the Diffuse colour to the Reflection group (copy)
Refraction Group -> Transparency -> set to 0
(at 0, light will bounce off, not penetrate. Makes sharply-defined reflected images in glass)
BRDF -> Custom Reflectivity -> 0 Degree Refl. -> set it to .5

[cgexperience]

It's rendered with vray the sky is hdri, the house is textured not with marble it's supposed to be a render on the walls but I didn't get the tiling right because I couldn't see what I was doing. I missed the the bit with the palm trees thanks for pointing that out, but I'm not sure about the leaves on the bush that's how big they are here in oz. Regarding the windows originally I had a mirror finish but later changed my mind, I did the interior setup the wall and doors. I didn't put any furniture in it thought about doing it later on.

Also regarding the lighting I had a look at some professional rendering s and just mimicked their lighting, I too thought it was strong but just went along with everyone else plus the sunlight in australia is pretty strong and not much different to the render. It gets so hot here especially out in the outback that you could fry your eggs outside on the hood of your car. lol

[cgexperience]

lol I just noticed your a fellow aussie, mate you know as well as I do how hot it can get in Qld and the NT including Alice Springs. Oh I forgot to mention that the scale issues is my fault I just recently learned the basics of autocad and drew this up myself from a reference pic, I don't what the dimensions should be so I came up with something that just looks good. I didn't think it was going to be an issue once I started modeling but it was. It's actually 1 1/2 times bigger than it should be, for now I'm not too fussed about about as I'm wrapped that I can draw my own plans, considering an architectural plan that costs from $1600 and up I've got a pretty good thing going. Anyway it's for modeling and not building a home, so I'm pretty happy with it plus I've gained an extra skill.