Hey Steve
Thanks for the comment. Well the software isn’t anything special. Just sketchup in a combination with Vray for sketchup plugin.
First of all, you will have to model your house and enviroment. Do it detailed so you have good control over textures afterwards.
Setup the light settings with Vray Hdri/sun or Sky dome. (good tutorials for that on the net)
Search good textures on the internet and place em on ur faces. Adjust bump/reflection etc… in Vray.
Tip : Some manufacturers provide textures from their products on the net. Example bricks, Gloster garden furniture provide 3D models on their website etc…
Plants : are a combination of 2D face me components and 3D plants : vray proxy.
You can buy 3D plants at evermotion/X-frog etc… you’ll have to open these in 3Dsmax + vray and save them as vray proxy.
Import them into sketchup trough Vray and redo the texturing provided with the plants.
Now u will see a low polygon plant on screen but when rendered its high poly.
In that way you can use alot of plants in sketchup without crashing.
Tip : If you don’t have 3ds max+vray, i would suggest find a friend who has a licensed one coz u only need it to convert the plants. Afterwards its of no use anymore (the software isnt cheap)
Car/leaves : provided by Sketchup warehouse, just adjust the textures/color trough Vray
Now render in vray for sketchup and save as a png.
Also render an ambient oclusion pass and a Z-depth pass.
When finished you can do some post production in Gimp/photoshop or whatever u like to use.
Add background/clouds, do some color corrections, etc…
With a good light setup in Vray/sketchup you won’t need alot of post pro.
You would be able to make all this in 3dsmax/cinema 4D etc… but i work alone, small firm so its gotta be fast and good. I think sketchup with Vray is the best solution for me. Bit depending of the project, I can make 1 3D-project with 4-5 screenshots per project in 8-12 h.
greetings T.
