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.

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)

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

* Foreground: Meshes distributed with ParticleFlow with higher densit
* 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.