Introduction

I am happy to share the Making Of story of my scene "Time Under The Trees”, which was created in 3ds Max and rendered in V-Ray.

I decided to make this series of images when I saw some photos of a Toorak Residence in a book. I thought it would be nice to make different seasonal images of a similar residence inside a forest, under some trees. I changed some of the architectural forms, colors, and materials to a large or a small extent throughout the creation process.

Organization & Layout

My project consisted of images with different seasons and lighting, so I needed to make:

• Variations of some models (like trees and ground)
• Variations of some materials (wet and dry materials, dry leaves etc)
• Variations of lighting

So from the beginning, I tried to keep everything organized. I named everything properly and used layers to organize things and grouped the layers. I believe this is very important and saved me a lot of time.

First, I modeled the base layout of the concept and adjusted my camera point of view. This was an important step because it meant I could adjust the level of detail in my models according to how close they were to the camera.

I defined the following zones (Fig.01):

• Zones with high detailed models (Foreground)
• Zones with medium detailed models (Midground)
• Zones with less detailed models (Background)

Modeling

Most of the models on this project were basic and simple, rectangular building parts. I modeled everything with editable poly and the basic tools such as chamfering, connect, extrude etc.Here you can see how I modeled the rocks on the ground (Fig.02 & Fig.03).



For the little pebbles on the ground, I used a composite technique:

• Foreground: Meshes distributed with ParticleFlow with higher density
• Midground: Meshes distributed with ParticleFlow with less density and displacement
• Background: Normal Mapping

First, I modeled a few different little stones (Fig.04 & Fig.05). I then converted these meshes into VrayProxy to save RAM. VrayProxy is an excellent feature of V-Ray.