This was my final project for one of my CAD classes. I graduate with an associates degree in CAD this Saturday.
We had to design a photo realistic house. The house was designed with Revit then imported into 3D studio max and some of the fnal touches were done in photoshop.
The compression is really killing this image. The orginal file is over 2mb and I had to compress it down to 500k so I could post it.
Tell me what you think this is my very first house done to this extent. I have somewheres around 40-50hrs into this project.
The house is almost 9000sf including the basement. My house is about 6000sf bigger than anyone elses in my class.
I eventualy plan on Selling the files on Turbosquid.com. Anyone interested in it let me know.
Ouch, you’re killing my 20" screen. Link would be better than inline.
If you were aiming for photorealism…well…
I’ll put this as nicely as I can: the image is not photorealistic. A photorealistic image should be indistringuishable from a photo of the real thing, and this is not.
I think it might help if you took out the Lotus, which (as a photo) is pretty striking, and makes the house look more fake.
The things that would make this look better: add some grungy textures to surfaces to make it looks more worn (even if it’s brand-new, a house is not perfectly uniform); chip off or fillet the edges of everything (nothing in real life has a razor-sharp CAD edge); model the tiles, or at least use a displacement map; use smoother shadows.
Thanks for the input Arclight. I wouldn’t of put the Lotus in there but we were required to have a car in the photo. The tiles were actually made with a displacement map and as far as adding more shadows, I would of but it was already taking to much time to render. I actually ran out of time on this project and had to hurry it along towards the end. If I get enough time I will make it a look a little more worn and not so uniform. I printed this image on photo paper at 17" x 22" and It looks remarkably better than on screen.
Realism is in the textures and lighting and unfortunately thats where it’s falling short.
I’m guessing this was done in the standard 3DSMax/Viz renderer?
The textures fall extremely short, especially on the grass, fountain, water, bushes, and even the background seems to have some weird kind of sky (did you photoshop clouds in above the house?). With the bushes, try to either mix up the images you use with other plants, or only use a few of them and adjust your camera angle so you aren’t forced to show 15 of the same bush scaled different sizes. Textures like the grass and dirt should be scaled maybe to 1/10th of their current size, and probably replaced with a more high res/consistent texture.
Another thing that throws it off is the camera angle. It looks like the viewer is floating 20 feet in the air. Having the camera angle at a realistic height increases the realism of the shot.
You should take a look at other peoples works and see what makes them work so well. Heres a pretty good example of a very convincing architectural render that I would buy for being photorealistic even if I could spot small details like the bushes, etc.
I agree with what everyone has said. Its no need for me to repeat the comments that were already stated. With that being said, I do think the house itself looks fairly realistic in regards to construction and overall proportions. Why did you decide to go 6000sq/ft larger than anyone in your class?
I have been very busy with work, working 12hr shifts, so I haven’t had anytime to fix my house. Maybe I’ll find sometime over the weekend.
Jay-Carter:Why did you decide to go 6000sq/ft larger than anyone in your class?
The reason I went with a much lager house was because with all of my assignments/work I allways try to do things much harder than the rest of my class just to see if I can do it. I thrieve off learning as much as I can. I haven’t taken on a project yet that I couldn’t complete. There have been times that I had to rush towards the end just to meet my deadline but I’ve always been right on time and unlike most of my classmates I also had a job that took up all of my free time so all most all of my work had to be done in class.
One thing that comes to mind with the size of the house is quality vs quantity.
I suppose it depends on how your teacher taught the class as well as how he graded. Some professors would be easily impressed with a photorealistic lighthouse, some might want a geometry fest of different textures and materials, etc.
I agree with Cyberdemon re: quality vs. quantity. I think that constructing a model of a much smaller house with more attention paid to details and textures would have been far more impressive than this. It would also have been interesting to see something other than a production home, but that may be due to a bias of your teacher.
The Lotus and the sky are big tell-tales here. I would have gone for a much softer, simpler sky. Even a clear, pale blue would look better because it would be less distracting.
I would definitely disagree with Jay-Carter’s assesment of it as a realistic looking design. The thing that jumps out at me is the stone veneer areas, where they go straight up a facade with no wrap and no cap. Typically for this sort of house, the stone would be used as a wainscot, and wrap around the corners 5’-0", with a cap row at the top which protrudes a couple inches further than the face of the rest of the ‘stone’. Stone veneer rarely just ends like that, and this is a great example of why.
I’ve probably sounded really harsh here, and I apologize for that. I just hope that you will not feel complacent, and really start to explore what is out there in the realm of architectural modelling and rendering.
