11 Tips for Sprucing Up Your Arch Viz Images

Great tutorial here. This is an archviz professional giving great tips on how to spruce up an images. As you can see from the sampled image, his tips work pretty good. This is definitely worth a read.

Basic Lighting Settings for Vray in Sketchup

Basic Light Settings in V-Ray for SketchUp Tutorial from ASGVIS, LLC on Vimeo.

Basic Light Settings in V-Ray for SketchUp


Video tutorial by Jorge Barrero.

UVW Unwrap Tutorial

A few months ago I showed how I would go about modelling a high-poly piece of furniture. This is a continuation of that tutorial. This segment explains the basic techniques for how to unwrap that furniture for proper texturing. Hopefully it is helpful. If you have any more questions / suggestions feel free to comment.

The first part of this tutorial (the modelling part) is found right here.

Vray Dirt Tutorial

A lot of people find FreeCG.info while searching for tutorials on Vray Dirt. This might help. It is a straightforward tutorial about this powerful shader. It should cover everything you need to do to start using it right away. It is done by Peter Guthrie. Good stuff.

Best Vray Settings Tutorials

For those of you looking for a comprehensive tutorial about the different GI methods in Vray, and which is best to use, this is the tutorial for you.

More Vray Materials.mp4

Tutorial - 3d Studio Max 2012 - Substance Materials

Beginner Tutorial - Making Tileable Textures

3ds Max Tutorial: How to Use a Zdepth Pass to Generate a Displacement Map

This is not the next video in my series, but it is helpful nonetheless. This technique can be a huge time saver. Check it out.

Part 1: CAD Import and Basic Modeling of a Building in 3ds max

This tutorial shows the steps I take in doing an architectural visualization project. Hopefully there will be many more to follow. I am hoping to have videos for all stages of the project from start to finish. Make sure to subscribe so you can see them all. Enjoy.

Vray Sun and Sky Tutorial + linking to a daylight system

This is a common thing that people want to do with Vray but it is not always obvious how it is done. Plus, the Vray Sun can be a little bit confusing if you are new to it, so this is a good tutorial for examining how it works. watch carefully!

Vray 2 Sided Material Tutorial

Here is a tutorial that a lot of you might need, if you use Vray. It is a brief tutorial on how to use Vray 2 sided material, specifically to make a lampshade. I think this material is awesome, but I was a little confused about how to use it at first. Once you figure it out, you will find all kinds of uses for it I am sure. It works great on anything that needs to appear translucent. You will find the tutorial here.

What I Learned From This Project

This was an interesting project because the humongous existing trees were a very important part. At first they gave me a crappy photo of the corner with all the trees, but there were two problems. First, the picture was not good. Second, there was no way I could cut out the trees in photoshop to fit in a building behind them. For these reasons I decided to make the tree using Onyx garden. I have never been able to make a good looking tree this big before in Onyx. On this project I think I was successful, and the main thing to keep in mind is that it is going to take a lot of polygons. The branches alone were 5 million. I imported them into max as a 3ds and attahced all the elements together into one mesh. This took a long time, but when I tried to combine them all at once it shot my page file usage up to 21 gigs, and my computer just about melted. Anyway...when I got them all combined together I used a pro optimizer modifier to reduce polys. I believe this is new for max 2010. Works great. The leaves had to be exported seperately and they were another 3 million polys. Once I got all branches combined and mapped in one mesh, and the leaves in another, I made vray proxies of each of them respectively then grouped it all together. Whew! I hit render and I think it looks awesome.

The only other special things I did on this was to render out several different channels. I have a Zdepth for a DOF in Photoshop. I also have specular, reflection, and refraction channels. These I use as a linear dodge over the final rendering to increase any of these things. I often like to have more reflection then actually comes out of the final render. The refraction channel can be linear dodged and slightly blurred to make the windows look like they are really glowing. The last channel I had was a multimatte that seperated out the people for me. I used this to give myself some control over doing some motion blurs on the people.

Thats it. Hope you like the finished image.

Please comment if you think I could have done something better, or if you know of other techniques.

Free Vray Scene: Vray Sun and Sky

I found this little offering of scene setup for Vray Sun and Sky. Everything is ready for a sunset scene, already set up. If you are new to the settings of these things you will be able examine them and learn, or just use the ones in the file for your scene. Download the scene free here.

Compositing Tutorial - How Do You Use Different Passes to Create a Better Final Image?

This is something I couldn't figure out for a long time. Once I did, it opened up a lot of new techniques and ideas for me, and gave me a lot more creative control. I would recommend figuring this out, and then thinking of ways you can use it enhance your images in the post processing stage.

This tutorial lays out the technique very simply.

Awesome Rendering of a Skyscaper - and a tutorial of how

You see these really cool looking skyscraper renderings around the net. I personally have never had the pleasure of getting to work on a project like this. I wish I did. Anyway...I thought this tutorial was cool because of the unique techniques that are demonstrated. Here is the tutorial.

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Awesome Grass - Proxy + Vray Scatter

WOW! Look at that grass. I doubt this would work for large areas of grass, but I have never seen anything better for foreground grass. Check out how it is done right here. He is using Vray Scatter with proxied grass. I will post more about Vray Scatter later.

Here is the info on Vray Scatter.

Making Snow Look Cool (Using Displacement)

I have made a couple of snow scenes and it can be pretty tricky. This guy obviously figured it out pretty well. If you want some good ideas for your own projects check this one out.

Very In-Depth Tutorial for Archvis Using Vray and 3ds

This is a really great series of tutorials about exterior architectural scenes. There is lots of information here that I wish I had read several years ago, because that is about how long it took me to learn all this stuff on my own. Needless to say...it is very informative. Read all 4 parts to the series here.

View my complete list of 3ds max tutorials by clicking here.

Basic Vray Materials Part I