Render a luxurious building
Learn how to set up a detailed city scene and add details to improve your photorealism
Create a realistic city scene
Architectural visualisations are complex projects to work on and it can take a considerable amount of knowledge, skill and time to become proficient in this field. In this tutorial I will attempt to help you speed up this process by sharing some of the skills and techniques that I have developed over my time doing this particular type of work.
Where some projects are reliant on a specific toolset, such as rigging or texture painting, a visual artist working in the field of architecture has to be skilled in many areas, from modelling and texturing to lighting, shader creation, UV editing and much more. This makes producing results that wow an audience and please a client ever more difficult, but once you reach that goal it is wonderfully rewarding.
Setting the tone for an image can be a challenge, but there is plenty of room for experimentation and scope for delivering something that can be viewed as art as well as visual communication.
Many thanks to Arman Kadkhodaie for designing this building.
01 MODEL THE STREET
First draw a plane for the street. Make sure the dimensions are accurate and based on realworld reference, as this is very important when it comes to archviz images. For the best render results, you should use high-quality assets; Evermotion (Archmodels 211) and Quixel are great options for this.
02 ADD TREES AND FOLIAGE
For the foliage, take a look at some references from the real world. There’s irregularity in the shapes and sizes, and you can usually see dropped leaves in the street and pavements. I always use Forest Pack for scattering foliage, even if it’s just one tree! It’s the most powerful tool to control your scattering objects. For the trees, we used Evermotion, Maxtree, Quixel, and Forest Pack templates. Be careful not to use too much foliage in your scene, because this is an urban space.
03 URBAN DETAIL
We used Archmodels 211 from Evermotion and some Quixel assets for adding some extra urban details. These small details are very important. Pixar has been teaching us this for decades – just see Toy Story 2 from 1999, all the objects
had dirt scratches! Add as much extra detail as possible.
04 CREATE ASPHALT
First we need to make a good texture in Photoshop. Create a plane and set the Unwrap modifier. For textures, we used Aerial Textures from the R&D Group; this archive has the best asphalt detail. For the white line, we used the polygon archive, but we can also just use a Diffuse texture for this.
05 MAKE A REALISTIC ASPHALT SHADER: PART 1
Have you ever wondered what the secret is behind Quixel Mixer or Substance Alchemist and thought about how you can make water without those programs? You might think you could use dirty black and white for glossiness and that’s it. Unfortunately, after you add bump, normal, displace, you will not have clear water and it will show as an unrealistic result. You should mix a dirty black and white texture for the maps in your shader. My suggestion is to use a noise map, because you can control the amount of black and white in the shader, as well as the scaling, to get the results you desire. I have provided the shader ball with textures for you in this issue’s downloads.
06 MAKE A REALISTIC ASPHALT SHADER: PART 2
For this next step I purchased Asphalt 01 from rd-textures.com. Use the material loader script to load all textures in your shader slots. Create a composite map for all slots (diffuse, reflect, glossiness, normal, displace). We need one layer for the rd-texture and another for a black and white dirt texture. In the diffuse layer, the texture that you created in Photoshop should now be mixed with the asphalt from rd-texture.
07 PLANTS
For the garden/tree area we used Maxtree Vol 22 and 25, Evermotion Archmodels 176 and some Quixel assets. Closely follow your references and imagine how your scene would function in the real world – for example, avoid obstructing the pavement or road with any foliage!
08 THE FOOTPATH
For creating a pavement shader, the workflow is very similar to creating the asphalt shader, but for this we used the Herringbone Pavement 02 from Friendly Shade. The details are brilliant.
09 MAIN BUILDING SHADER
For creating a realistic stone shader first you need to analyse the stone in the real world. Our first texture was Physical 2 Marble from Cgaxis. We used two dirt layers with different radius to create realistic dirt on the edge of the stone. For reflection and glossiness, we used regular texture. You can convert diffuse texture from colour to black and white with Coronacolorcorrection and use it in the other shader slots.
10 SUNSET LIGHTING
The best way to achieve realistic lighting for an exterior scene is with an IBL (image-based lighting) workflow. For this, you need to purchase good HDRI files. I suggest you buy Peter Guthrie’s HDRIS; for the sunset we used ‘1934 Dusk Sun Clouds’. To control the amount of light, just play with gamma in the Coronacolorcorrection map.
11 NIGHT-TIME, CLOUDY LIGHTING
For cloudy night lighting, again, use HDRI maps. But in addition to HDRI, you also need to turn on all lights in lamp objects, like lustres,
street lamps, and garden lights. In cloudy cases, it is better to turn on some lamps, such as night lights. This will help you get better results. Don’t forget that you have to create the Z-depth element for cloud space, because on cloudy days we will usually have fog – for the best results, use the volumetric technique for this.
12 VOLUMETRIC FOG
To create a physical fog you need to have a great computer for rendering and a little patience! You should use Coronavolumemtl in Render Set up> environment> global Volume Material. Don’t forget Directionality in that material.
13 RENDER SETUP
Set the noise level limit to 4 or 5. Set denoise to high-quality mode. Select this mode and add whatever HDRI you want! After adding your different environment, click on Setup Lightmix. Be sure the Lightmix mode is set to Instanced Lights. You can see all lights layer by layer in Render Elements.
Using this workflow, if you accept the 30-40% slower rendering speed, you can produce whatever environment you need! You do not need to render for each light.
14 FRAME BUFFER
In the Lightmix tab, you can manage the lights with ease; you can turn them all on or off, set the light multiplier, and can control all the light colours. In the Post tab, with the tone mapping you can control all colour and lighting after rendering. Everything is clear!
You should also use LUT, and the best LUT I have seen is ‘Kim_ Amland_photographic_02.cube’.
Finally, you should save the render with CXR format.
15 POST-PRODUCTION
Along with Photoshop, Corona VFB is a great tool for postproduction. It has tools for bloom, glare, exposure, LUT, contrast, curves, and a great light mixer. It’s a 32-bit controller that enables you to play with the exposure parameter and change every light; you can even convert day to night. For this project, we used Photoshop and Nik Collection for post-production. •