I know. I have a bit of a coffee obsession. Three coffee machine modeled in just a few months. But honestly, vintage bean juicers are a thing of beauty.

This one is the KF20 Aromaster, designed in 1972 by Florian Seiffert for Braun, which back then was still a German company and one of the most prolific sources of the kind of rarefied minimalist design that Apple is known for nowadays.

This was a relatively quick one to model, largely because unlike most of my other models, I didn’t UV-unwrap any of it except the metal ring around the glass container. Instead, I used V-Ray’s triplanar map to add subtle texture details to the main plastic body. The dial marks on the front of the bottom part is just a decal, projected via a UV modifier set on a second UV layer. By the way, these faint marks and smudges were obtained by scanning an iPad screen in a flatbed scanner. Interesting grunge maps guaranteed.

On a side note, this was my first scene fully modeled in 3ds Max 2018. While 3ds Max 2017 was a broken disgrace of an update (I could seriously make it crash by just looking at it), Max 2018 has been only pure joy so far. It doesn’t have much in the way of new features–in fact, I can’t think of any right now–but it seems as solid and stable as Max 2016. This may not seem like much but by the abysmal standards Autodesk has set for its recent updates, being able to actually use the software is a big feat, albeit not one that would ever persuade me to hop onto the rental bandwagon of death. I’d love to hear what others make of 2018 and will definitely report back on how it holds up in much more complex scenes.

I also used V-Ray 3.6 here, which is an entirely different story altogether. Unlike Autodesk, Chaosgroup is known for its jam-packed and mostly free updates. I just love how the IPR is developing, and the addition of a focus picker right in the VFB is a godsend. It’s long been one of my favorite Octane features and I love being able to use it in V-Ray. Version 3.6 also brings a number of updates to V-Ray RT. I’m still not a huge fan of it though, partly because it still feels very slow on my 1080ti–slower than the CPU alone, even in such a simple scene–which is puzzling considering how fast Octane is. Most people love RT, which tells me the slowness could be a problem with my system. I’m told my aging HP Z820 doesn’t play well with big GPUs. Definitely something to look into and test further.

A few more renders below. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

I’ve been trying to raise my photogrammetry game in the past few weeks. This is what came out of it.

I decided to tackle some problem areas: Very dark (avocado), shiny (avocado, pomegranate), or very smooth (mango) assets, and objects with fine displacement that I’d been struggling to capture (melon).

What helped: Better lighting (cross-polarized, new ring flash…), better photos (shooting raw and converting to jpg in Lightroom, chase noise), better masking in Agisoft, and higher settings (ultra high for the dense cloud and the heaviest mesh possible).

It’s still not perfect. I’ve learnt that even cross-polarization doesn’t get rid of all reflections. There’s always a highlight here and there, sometimes from bouncing light, sometimes from the environment). But with a bit of smoothing in Agisoft and some ZBrush trickery, you can get very high-quality assets.

Generally though, the poor-man’s photogrammetry workflow remains valid, except the new approach has slightly better gear, the addition of the raw-processing step, and more time needed to process the higher-quality dense cloud.

All assets were retopologized and UVed in ZBrush and are relatively low poly, as you can see on the wire below, and use normal maps for the fine details except for the melon, which uses displacement.

For these elusive folds in the cloth (itself simulated in Marvelous Designer), I used Dabarti Capture to generate super high-quality normal maps from several sections of cloth, tiling this normal map in Affinity Photo, and generating a new depth map from it. If you don’t know this tool, it’s very well worth purchasing. It fills a big hole in photogrammetry when you want super-high displacement detail (much higher than Agisoft can capture) from a 2D surface rather than a 3D object. The latest version is great, with normal-map post-processing commands and the ability to process raw photos (works a charm with my Sony A7 raw files).

The wooden tray at the end of the series was a slightly different process. I used a quick-and-dirty 3D scan of the actual tray (which had a lot of noise in it) as a guide to remodel the tray using standard poly-modeliing techniques. The texture was then baked from the textured scanned object onto the Sub-D poly object directly in Max.

All shots here rendered with Octane and a little post-pro in ArionFX.

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

A few weeks ago, I started modeling Fermob’s Luxembourg line of outdoor furniture–itself a sensitive revamping of the original furniture of the Senate’s gardens in Paris. I wanted to showcase them in an outdoor setting, and that little project kind of took on a life of its own. I had fun experimenting with various techniques to make vegetation and developing the high-summer look I was aiming for.

The plants were the main challenge and the most fun part of the project. Below is a random list of the techniques I played with.

• The main hero trees in the garden surrounding the table were an attempt at combining the GrowFX workflow with scanned data for the trunks. Instead of stitching together the GrowFX tree with the trunk scanned model as I’d done before, this time, I displaced the trunk part of the GrowFX model by projecting it on a scanned trunk asset. This provides the rough displacement while a normal map takes care of the smaller details.
• I used leaves scanned with Dabarti Capture on most of the trees, taking advantage of the amazing normal maps this tool can generate.
• The ivy (or is it vine?) was my first attempt at using GrowFX for climbing plants thanks to the Object React modifier. For the leaves, I used scanned ivy (or vine?) leaves which I distributed as instances. This made for a very heavy mesh, which had to be converted to a proxy.
• For the box bushes, I modeled a few single branches in GrowFX and distributed these on bush-shaped meshes with Itoo’s Forest Pack, using this method.
• The moss followed a similar workflow, explained here.
• Most of the other plants are standard GrowFX creations, some using GrowFX’s built-in leave meshes and others instances for the leaves and flowers.
• The big cactus-like plant at the back of the image above was modeled from scratch in Max.

Other technical details:

• Forest pack was used extensively to scatter the vegetation, moss and pebbles (home-made scanned rock assets downscaled a bit).
• The bricks textures are from the excellent textures.com. Most of the other textures, including the rock-and-plaster wall at the back, are mine.
• The scene uses V-Ray’s environmental fog, but rendered as a separate pass and comped to speed up rendering.
• Post-production, as always, was done in ArionFX.
• You can check out some close-ups of the Luxembourg chair models on my Instagram feed.
• As for references, the garden is loosely based on this creation by landscape designer Kate Seddon in South Yarra.

As always, feel free to critique and comment below. You can see higher-res versions of the images here.

Some of you may have been wondering about the long spell of silence on this blog. One reason was some hard back-end work on the site that I’m happy to say is now over. Since 2011, this blog and its previous iterations had been hosted with a large US company (I won’t mention any name here) whose performance has sadly gone from bad to worse. I find everything to do with maintaining my website incredibly boring, so I long resisted doing anything about the situation. But by this summer, the problems–super slow servers, unplugged security holes, repeatedly broken WordPress features, frequent outages, non-existent customer support, etc.–had become so bad that ignoring them was no longer an option. So I took my courage in both hands and decided to transfer both the blog and its domains to a new provider.

After doing some research and with my two priorities being better support and faster performance, I decided to go with SiteGround. I’m very glad I did. While they’re not the cheapest host around, they are battle-tested (they’ve been operating since 2004) and their support is just incredible. They took care of the website’s transfer themselves, for free, and completed it in just a few hours, with all files, plugins and settings intact. Transferring the domains was equally easy and, incredibly, took less than a day. I opened a few tickets and used their live chat repeatedly during the transfer and they invariably responded within minutes, sometimes seconds, with super-competent advice. The boys and girls behind these terminals are genuine experts, speak flawless English, and have been a real joy to deal with. If you also operate a site and have been thinking about switching host, you could do much worse than check them out.

If you test the site, which remains reachable both at bertrand-benoit.com and bbb3viz.com, you should experience much faster load speed and, hopefully, things won’t get broken with the same regularity as they have in the past. If you do spot any weirdness, make sure to let me know. As for me, I can now get back to far more interesting things.

Anyone who’s spent some time browsing through my posts knows I have a bit of an obsession with modernist architecture. This is another one of these rather futile attempts at re-creating existing modernist masterpieces–this time Marcel Breuer’s Hooper House II, a private US commission the exiled German Hungarian architect started in 1957 and completed in 1959 for one of his main patrons. The house in Baltimore, Maryland, still stands today and is occupied by its new owners.

On the technical side, the modeling was done in 3ds Max and rendered in a daily build of Corona 1.7 (hence the nice hair on the sheep skin). Exlevel’s GrowFX and IToosoft’s Forest Pack Pro are used extensively, and there’s a sprinkling of RailClone for the stone floor, concrete tiles in the driveway, and railings on one outside wall. I took the opportunity to throw in a bunch of photo-scanned assets–rocks, trees, leaves and the stone wall texture, which was actually grabbed from the side of an old church off Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. There’s a tiny bit of volumetric fog in the exterior views and some basic particle systems for the pond in the patio. ZBrush and MD were used to help model some of the assets, which, as usual, are all mine, as are 90% of the textures.

The scene is lit with this great Peter Guthrie sky.

I would have liked to push this a little further in order to render additional views (the environment is very patchy in places). But the heavy geometry, large amount of 4K and 8K textures, and liberal use of displacement meant the scene already gobbled up nearly all of my 64GB. No doubt the scene is also a nightmare of non-optimization.

The images were rendered at roughly 2K and there’s a little post-production in places. But Corona is so advanced on that front that much of the post-work was done in the frame buffer.

To finish off with the stats, this project was completed over a period of three or four months, working very occasionally whenever time allowed. Some of the assets were re-used from older projects. Render times fluctuated between about 2 hours for the exteriors and five to six hours for some of the trickier interior views. There’s a little bit of denoising going on in the interiors.

I used 3ds Max 2018 from start to finish and am happy to say it’s been extremely stable for me, at least on that project. In order to simplify the handling of such a large scene, I split it in three and grouped them in one master project using XRefs. Even so, I had some very, very long loading times for the main scene (I’m talking nearly 10 minutes towards the end of the project), which I can’t really explain since saving times were very fast.

All in all, it was nice getting back to Corona after a long hiatus and test some of the latest features. The speed remains amazing even though this was one of my slowest-rendering scenes ever. It’s when working on a project like this one that I can really tell my system is getting a little long in the tooth.

This was completed a few weeks ago. In the meantime, I’ve been lucky enough to be given the opportunity to test FStorm. I haven’t done anything worth showing yet, but watch this space in the coming weeks for some FStorm thoughts.

Some more renders below. You can find all my recent work on my Behance and in full-res on my Flickr gallery.

Recently, I was given the chance to try out FStorm, a GPU-only renderer being developed by Andrey Kozlov. I’d been intrigued by FStorm since seeing the work of Johannes Lindqvist and Daniel Reuterswärd, two of my favorite Archviz artists, who use it as their main renderer. After a few weeks of experimenting, I wanted to report some initial thoughts.

FStorm has a decent scene converter for Octane, V-Ray and Corona files, so my first step was to convert two V-Ray scenes, which turned out relatively nice with just a few manual tweaks (mainly for SSS materials):

But I also wanted to build an FStorm scene from scratch in order to explore the material workflow. For this, I picked a relatively simple setting: A minimalist interior by Hans Verstuyft Architects in a David Chipperfield tower in Antwerp. All the images below were tone-mapped in the FStorm real-time frame buffer and saved as .jpg, with no further post-production. Scroll down for a summary of my thoughts regarding FStorm.

Clearly, I’ve only scratched the surface of FStorm but here are a few initial thoughts based on this small project.

• I initially found FStorm to be slow for a GPU renderer when rendering interiors, but this was before I placed portals in my windows. This sped things up considerably. It’s been years since I had to work with portals in any renderer, so it felt strange to go back to them. But why not. They certainly work well here.
• Bearing this in mind, FStorm in very fast. I won’t make a direct comparison with V-Ray RT or Octane, but it always feels fluid, even on relatively large scenes. It’s particularly good at resolving DOF and bokehs quickly, which can take a long time in other renderers.
• FStorm has simple but effective tonemapping tools that pretty much remove the need for external post-production on stills. All images here were saved as .jpg from the frame buffer.
• Compared with V-Ray RT, I missed a good denoising tool, which is sometimes needed to take an almost-clean render over the finish line.
• I liked the fact that FStorm has essentially one material to cover pretty much all physical properties of real-life surfaces. This is a clear advantage over Octane, whose glossy material doesn’t have SSS and where glossy refraction and glossy reflection can’t be separated.
• I struggled to wrap my head around FStorm’s SSS settings, though the real-time feedback made it very easy to iterate.
• One big limitation of FStorm is that it supports none of 3ds Max’s built-in maps and offers only a small set of its own maps, some of which are pretty limited. Its falloff map, for instance, doesn’t allow users to draw a custom curve, which can be frustrating.
• I painfully missed a triplanar map. It hasn’t been too long since triplanar maps were introduced in V-Ray and Max, but it’s incredible how quickly I’ve come to find them completely indispensable.
• I found FStorm’s support for normal maps limited and frustrating. Essentially, I haven’t been able to make any asset using normal maps look good. The surface always looked weird. The FStorm bitmap is also missing some important functionalities when used as a normal map loader, such as the ability to flip green and red values (necessary for ZBrush-produced normal maps). For me, this was one of the most limiting aspects of FStorm given my high reliance on normal maps when using photoscanned assets or maps. Traditional bump maps work as expected.

Altogether, I found FStorm very pleasant to use. It gave me very fast feedback on this interior (perhaps the fastest of all real-time renderers I’ve tried so far) and I could generate final 2K images in about an hour each on a single 1080ti.

One caveat to bear in mind is that FStorm is a rental-only application and doesn’t offer permanent licenses. This may or may not bother you, depending where you stand in that debate. Regular readers of this blog know where I stand. I will just say the business model is the main reason why I didn’t look into FStorm earlier, and it will remain a big barrier for many potential users who, like me, would have taken the plunge much earlier had the option of a permanent license been available.

Can’t believe it’s been almost a year since the last BBB3viz Black Friday sales. The old-timers among you know that Black Friday is the one and only BBB3viz Warehouse sales ever–the only chance there is to pick some of my Turbosquid assets at a hefty 30% discount.

This year, the sales will kick off on Friday, November 24th at one minute past midnight CET (or just after 6pm EST on Thursday, November 23rd) and wrap up on Monday, November 27th at midnight in Europe.

Like last year, I’ll try to offer a broad range of discounts. As always, you can expect markdowns on all my full scenes as well as a number of individual items. Turbosquid still doesn’t have a way for sellers to automate sales, meaning that all items must be marked down and up again by hand. This means not all assets will be discounted, so check this out and if there is something you absolutely want, make sure to let me know in the comments below or on the Facebook page.

I’ll post again shortly before the sales with a list of discounted items and the corresponding links.

We’re on!

As of now–a little earlier than planned–and up to midnight CET on Monday, you can get your hands on a broad selection of my scenes and assets at a 30% discount.

As always, I’ve sought to strike a balance between full scenes and smaller individual models. The focus is on the most recent products, including some, like the Swedish Flat, that have never been discounted before.

Remember, I only do sales once a year. If you miss this one, this is it.

The links are below, but please read the two warnings before you go ahead

WARNING1: Turbosquid servers may take a little while to update, so before you buy, make sure the price is the discounted price. If not, refresh or check back a little later.

WARNING2: This sounds silly but I’m going to say it anyway as it’s been an issue in the past: These are 3D models, not actual pieces or furniture or property. If you buy a Swedish flat for $99, you won’t be able to live in it and you won’t receive it in the post.

With this out of the way, here are the links:

FULL SCENES

Swedish flat (V-Ray / Corona) $99 instead of $149

70m2 apartment (Corona) $99 instead of $149

Scandinavian Interior (V-Ray) $99 instead of $149

Photoreal Still Life Scene (V-Ray / Corona / Octane) $66 instead of $99

Futuristic Modern Atrium (Corona): $66 instead of $99

Industrial Loft (Corona) $99 instead of $149

Parisian Interior (V-Ray) $66 instead of $99

COLLECTIONS

Bread & Pastry Collection 1 (V-Ray) $39 instead of $59

Bread & Pastry Collection 2 (V-Ray) $39 instead of $59

Bread & Pastry Collection 3 (V-Ray) $39 instead of $59

Chocolate & Sweets Collection (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Fruit & Vegetable Collection (V-Ray) $39 instead of $59

Cheese & Accessories collection (V-Ray / Octane) $39 instead of $59

Kitchen Collection 3 (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

FURNITURE & APPLIANCES

QuickMill Espresso Machine (V-Ray / Octane) $33 instead of $49

Rocket Espresso Machine (V-Ray / Corona) $26 instead of $39

Venetian Mirror (V-Ray / Octane) $26 instead of $39

FK6270 Armchair and plaid (V-Ray / Octane) $26 instead of $39

Oscar Armchair (V-Ray / Octane) $26 instead of $39

Spanish Chair (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Hunting Chair (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Decorative twigs & bottle (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Wood Kitchen (V-Ray / Corona) $33 instead of $49

Vintage Les Arcs Chair (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Photographic Lighting Equipment (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Vietnamese Pho Soup (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

VEGETATION & TREES

Scanned Tree 1 (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Scanned Tree 2 (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Scanned Tree 3 (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Scanned Tree 4 (V-Ray) $26 instead of $39

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to all!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been testing V-Ray Next GPU on just one 1080ti and this is the result of these experiments. The speed is obviously a huge improvement on the CPU (and on older V-Ray RT running on the GPU). V-Ray Next has also made a huge jump in the number of core V-Ray feaures it supports on the GPU (and in the IPR), which makes it increasingly hard to justify rendering on the CPU alone. I still miss textured environmental fog, the curvature map, and 2D displacement, but apart from those, I now see very little downside in working on the GPU for final renders now.

The remaining cons are known and essentially revolve around having to fit the scene in the card’s VRAM. Clearly, when you’re used to working with 64GB, moving to something like 8GB (Windows 10 eats up a few GB of VRAM on my 11GB 1080ti) requires quite a lot of discipline. In this scene, I decided against using any form of render-time displacement. After many tests I found that either the displaced scene didn’t fit on my card, or I had to reduce the quality settings so much that it was no longer convincing. Also, preparing the scene for rendering slows down a lot when using displacement. Instead, for things like the walkway, I displaced the mesh in Max, decimated the result, and used a normal map to get the finer relief.

I also tried to keep most textures to a maximum of 2K instead of my standard 4K, except for those, such as the bricks, that had to be very fine. The HDR map is also very low-res. This saved VRAM and made no appreciable difference to the final quality of the pictures.

Speed-wise, these were rendered with environmental fog at 2K in between 30 minutes and one hour on a single 1080ti and the CPU using hybrid rendering. This is considerably faster than what I’m used to on just the CPU. I used the in-house denoiser for a final polish because the Nvidia AI denoiser tended to wash out my roof tiles, essentially mistaking the fine geometry for noise. The denoiser was useful when pushing a 30-min render over the finish line. By waiting just a little longer, I would reach my noise threshold and the final image would be clean enough not to need any denoising. The most problematic areas when rendering were the spots where V-Ray lights (spheres and planes) illuminate the fog. These were pretty noisy and tough to clean up, as you’d expect if you’ve used environmental fog on the CPU.

I may put this scene up for sale once V-Ray Next is officially out. I’ll post again once that happens. It could be a good test for a GPU set-up, and it has some interesting assets in addition to the building, including the scanned walkway and road and a set of detailed scanned dead leaves that are great for scattering.

Below is a little animated GIF showing some stages of the scene building and look development.

And finally to wrap up, a little bonus about how I went about modeling this building. This is an existing, 19th century structure that happens to be on the campus of the Charité hospital in Berlin. It is an actual psychiatric clinic and I always found it had a beautiful creepy Victorian Gothic vibe to it. Since I couldn’t find blueprint for it, I decided to photoscan the entire building in chunks, assemble and scale the scans in Max, and use them to poly-model the asset very much as you would use tracing paper to copy a photograph. It’s a low-tech cheat, but it worked much better than using just the photographs in terms of capturing accurate proportions. Click here for a visual breakdown of the process.

Et voilà, in time to celebrate the release of V-Ray Next, Psycho is now up for sale here. It is my first full-scale scene to have been made from scratch with V-Ray GPU in mind. Use it and abuse it if you feel so inclined, but remember it was rendered on a 1080ti with 11GB of VRAM. It may not work on smaller cards. Also, it requires Itoosoft’s Forest Pack Pro to render properly (you will lack the grass and the leaves if you don’t have it and the scene will throw an ugly error message upon loading). In any case, make sure to read the full notes on the description before you click on this “purchase” button.

No, notwithstanding the headline, this won’t be a post about US politics. Rather, this is just a quick update on test-driving the latest version of FStorm.

I first loaded up my garden scene to test FStorm’s latest VRAM-management tricks and to try out GeoPatterns, a new tool that allows you to scatter tiling geometry on a mesh following its UV coordinates (think of it as a hybrid between displacement and scattering).

But then I got a little carried away, fixing things I didn’t like in the original scene and adding a number of scanned assets and textures produced since.

I’m happy to report that FStorm swallowed and rendered this (pretty big) scene without complaint despite tons of Forrest Pack objects, high-res displacement everywhere and with zero optimization compared to the CPU scene (even small objects have 4K textures). After adding a bunch of new vegetation, FStorm did briefly appear to choke on the scene, but enabling bitmap optimization fixed the issue and it was back to rendering away.

GeoPatterns works as advertised and the applications are seemingly endless. In this scene, the tiles in the table area is done with it. I tried to do GeoPatterns moss too but reverted back to a Forrest object after failing to achieve the effect I was after. That said, this is really a killer feature that no other renderer offers at present (barring Andrey’s now unsupported V-RayPatterns).

One thing FStorm could still improve is how it does fog. The fog in the images below was done in post using a ZDepth pass after I tried to set up a volumetric fog using the SSS approach and found that render times were shooting right up. I tried reducing the size of the fog object volume as much as possible but it didn’t really help. And the current workflow (add a sphere with inverted normals around the camera and link the two together) is cumbersome and it breaks the ability to extract a ZDepth pass.

Right now, Corona still has the best volumetric fog implementation of all renderers I use. It always looks beautiful out of the box and is pretty quick to render. So is V-Ray Next’s GPU fog. Plus Corona and V-Ray also have very solid denoisers–something else I’m missing in FSTorm–which make any residual graininess irrelevant.

FYI: Each image rendered for about 30 minutes on a single 1080ti at 2K. Thanks to Andrey for letting me test the latest version of FStorm.

Continuing my exploration of GPU rendering, I wanted to celebrate my modest workstation upgrade (from a one-card to a slightly less slow two-card system) with the release of a new scene, this time an interior, which is always a little more challenging in terms of render speed and optimization.

You can find the scene in the warehouse here.

Like the last one, this scene was designed for V-Ray Next GPU specifically. It’s a big scene, with such details as a fully 3D exterior environment made up of three distinctive, fully-modeled facades, high-resolution assets, and photogrammetry models and textures, but it has been optimized to fit on a at least a 1080ti (11GB) under Windows 10, with quite a few GB of VRAM to spare even without resorting to V-Ray’s on-demand texture optimization option.

The goal was to build a scene that would easily fit on the GPU, with the benefits this affords in terms of exponentially faster render times, while not making any sacrifices in quality, complexity and overall realism. The result is a scene that is as complex and as detailed as it would be if it were built for the CPU but that renders much faster (about one hour for each 2K images on two 1080ti and given a noise threshold of 0.01).

Talking about complexity and realism, just to mention a few examples, the Cesca chair has hand-modeled caning instead of an opacity texture. The wishbone chair has individually modeled paperchord strands. And the logs underneath the oven are individually scanned and retopoed real-life logs.

The scene is an environment, but it is also a model collection packed with original assets that would be difficult to find elsewhere.

Mostly, the illumination is provided by the environment, with the exception of the hallway scene, which was too far from the windows and gets a big boost of artificial lighting.

To save VRAM, the flat’s five rooms are split into separate layers that can be switched on or off as needed.

Unlike some past scenes, such as Norsouth, this is a genuinely 360-degree environment, modeled and textured to be seen from virtually all possible angles (as long as the camera stays inside the flat). This would make it an ideal candidate for a VR or a real-time project. The addition of a fully 3D exterior backdrop as opposed to a simple photographic backplate means proper perspective is preserved at all times when moving the camera around.

One last notable info is that this was my first full-scale project made while using substance painter and designer. Some textures (including the variations of Terrazzo) were made in Designer while some assets (such as the foldable chair in the living room) were textured in Painter.

The scene is available now for 3ds Max 2016 and up and V-Ray Next GPU. It will render on V-Ray Next (on CPU) but the shaders may need some adjustments, especially those that use procedural noise in the bump slot.

This is the first in a series of posts on this scene. Next will be a collection of timelapse videos that document almost the entire construction of the scene. This will come as soon as I’ve learned the basics of Da Vinci Resolve and got down to editing the hours of low-framerate footage that I’ve collected. And after that, I want to develop other versions of the scene for different renderers that will gradually be added to this archive. In between, I’ll probably show off a few recent photogrammetry models I’ve done, trying to capture relatively shiny surfaces, which are always tricky.

Hope you like the scene and enjoy the other images below.

Black Friday is here again. Feels like it was just yesterday.

As every year, it means you can grab some of my assets at 30% off starting this Friday (Nov. 23) and ending on Monday (Nov. 26) at midnight Central European Time.

But it gets better: In the past, I’ve only applied discounts to a handful of my assets, generally the bigger scenes, because Turbosquid didn’t have a bulk function to reset prices. Now that this function has been introduced, I’m going to apply the 30% discount to my entire archive, minus the Checkmate assets whose prices can’t be changed. Altogether, it’s well over 200 assets, from full 3D environments to individual pieces of furniture and shaded scans, with a third of the price knocked off.

So check this space on Friday and if you don’t see the discounts immediately, refresh your browser as the new prices may take some time to propagate. If in doubt, just drop me a line in the comments below and I’ll try to respond a little faster than I normally do.

A few weeks ago, I began posting unedited modeling and scene-building time-lapse videos (the series is called The Apartment and I’ll be uploading more installments as I get down to editing the captures) documenting the construction of my Classical scene.

As the comments about the videos started rolling in, several people began asking whether I was using mainly native 3ds Max tools or some third-party scripts to model. I realized that the reason they were asking was that I was using a fair number of custom keyboard commands to trigger third-party tools, which made it difficult for people with their own installs of Max to understand what was going on.

From there came the idea of a short post documenting all the third-party scripts and plugins that I have integrated into my daily workflow. In order to make things simple, I will focus on free tools, ignoring for now the likes of Forest Pack, RailClone or GrowFX, which are big, mind-bending modeling solutions in their own right that just happen to run in 3ds Max.

I will also limit myself to the tools I use on a daily basis. I’ve collected many cool scripts over the years, some of which are still being maintained, but I only ever use a handful of them regularly. The scripts below are those that have passed the test of time. These are the tools I install on the first day whenever I set up a new version of Max.

I realize there’s a degree of habit involved here. As Max evolves, it develops new functionalities that can make some scripts obsolete. Sometimes, though, I will still keep using the third party tool out of sheer inertia or laziness.

I will add to this list over time if I come across more indispensable gems. Likewise, please tell me your thoughts about these, suggest your own, and let me know about better alternatives.

Drag & Drop Reference Image by cbuelter
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/drag-drop-reference-images
You’ve seen this one over and over again in my modeling time-lapses. Drag any image file into the window and this script will make a plane to the image’s exact dimension and map it with the image as a texture. This turns a laborious process into a one-click affair. There are a few options too, including assigning a V-Ray material to the plane. A must-have to bring any blueprint, plans or references into Max quickly.
(The cbuelter site seems to be down right now so not sure exactly where to find the script these days.)

Extend Borders by Racoon Artworks
http://www.racoon-artworks.de/?p=343
This is kind of hard to explain but this script extrudes the open borders of a poly object while conserving the model’s existing angles instead of distorting them as a native extrude would. Check the videos on the site and you’ll know what I mean. This is one of the tools that I have mapped to my keyboard and use over and over again. It’s super fast and addresses one of the oldest and most vexing gripes about modeling in Max.
Racoon has a few other tools on the site that may be worth checking out. I’m intrigued by Shape Connect, for example, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Rapid Tools by Rapid Tools
https://rapidmxs.com/store-main/rapidtools/
This one is a gold mine and hugely popular. It’s a Swiss army knife suite of modeling scripts that offer a mixture of productivity tools (make stuff faster than naked Max) and extensions (make stuff that naked Max can’t do).
The list of tools is long but my favorites include fast-loop-regularizer to make circles on models, zero-weld tool, which takes the tedium out of welding verts, and the RapidQCap, to cap cylinders and other open model parts with nice quads.
There are many more things in the list that I don’t use that often but are still incredible time-savers, including a fast conformer and a Spline FFD modifier. Check out the site for even more stuff.

Mass Randomizer by Arda Kutlu
http://www.ardakutlu.com/maxscripts/#massRandomizerJump
There are many randomizers around and this is the one I’ve settled on. It offers a quick way to randomize the rotation, translation, mat ID, UVs, etc. of any objects.

Soulburn Scripts by Neil Blevins
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_tools/scripts/3dsmax/soulburnscripts.htm
This is a classic that hardly needs introducing. Like RapidTools, Neil’s big bag of scripts offers a huge selection of smart and fast tools to make your modeling life easier. A personal favorite is the object detacher, which works in the blink of an eye.

MultiTexture by CG-Source
https://cg-source.com/multitexture.php
Many renderers have developed their own versions of MultiTexture, but the original still works nicely and the latest version has some interesting new functionalities (which have unfortunately made it a little clunkier to use).  
While you’re on the site, check their collection of commercial textures that can be used in conjunction with the script.

Floor Generator by CG-Source
https://cg-source.com/floorgenerator.php
A must-have for anyone who does interiors, the tool generates various types of parquet geometry inside a closed spline, with cool randomizing options. You can use it in combination with MultiTexture to make wood floors that show no visible repetition over large areas.
The latest version is now a modifier, which has the huge advantage of being non-destructive. The basic tool is free but there’s a paid version too that adds different styles of floors, such as basket-weave or hexagon tiles.

Unique Material ID by CG-Source
https://cg-source.com/uniquematerialids.php
Another free tool by cg-source that works very well in conjunction with MultiTexture. Use it in those situations where you need to randomize the material IDs of elements in your mesh without setting a specific ID range.

Glue by Itoosoft
https://www.itoosoft.com/freeplugins/glue
A simple tool by the makers of Forest Pack and RailClone that drops a spline on a mesh object. I’m always surprised at how often I find myself using it. Very useful to drop text on curved surfaces for instance.  

Clone by Itoosoft
https://www.itoosoft.com/freeplugins/clone
Another Itoosoft free tool. Recent versions of Max have far more powerful cloning tools that use MCG these days. But I never warmed to any of them, strangely, and I always find myself going back to this super simple version.

Christmas came early this year in the shape of a small truckload of high-end furnishing fabric samples and swatches, ranging from 2mx2m to 20cmx20cm. So of course, I’ve been busy scanning away and will be doing so for some time to come. I’ve been using Dabarti Capture to generate hyper-detailed normal maps (no displacement map yet for time reason but I may go back and generate them later using the tiled normal maps).

Scanning is only part of the process, though. Creating tileable maps and realistic shaders from these maps takes time too and can often be hard to get right. For the last finish, scattering some fibers helps a lot to boost the realism and achieve this fuzzy fabric look. It also goes a long way to re-creating the grazing-angle color fade observed in many softer fabrics. As you can see, I’ve been experimenting here with trying to get the right amount of fuzz and the right scale (the image above probably has a little too much). For this, I’ve used my favorite plugin, Itoo Forest Pack Pro, to scatter splines on the entire chair. The splines themselves have a 2sided material in order to pick up some glow from the back light.

Above and below are just a few examples of the resulting material, rendered in V-Ray Next GPU. The chair, by the way, is Swoon, by Space Copenhagen for Fredericia. The side table is Pon, by Jasper Morrison, also for Fredericia. The models are displayed in a slightly modified version of my Classical scene, which you can get here (for V-Ray and FStorm).

I’ve been looking into Nuke, Fusion and Resolve lately as part of my continuous effort to diversify away from Adobe products. This was done as part of a simple compositing and editing exercise. Which is why it’s so rough.

The scans are basic iPhone scans done with Heges and brought into Max with virtually no modifications. This was all rendered in FStorm, using the direct light kernel to keep render times under 1 minute per frame. The soundtrack was put together directly in Resolve.

It took a while but I’ve now got round to putting up my animated olive trees in the warehouse. Check them out here.

The download includes two separate archives, one with the three, animated GrowFX objects, one with three static trees collapsed into three big meshes. Only the former includes the wind animation.

As always, make sure to read all the small print before purchasing.

Below a few more raw renders and a sample of the wind animation:

By now, I’ve spent almost two thirds of my life away from the place where I was born. But when it comes to architecture, I’m still a patriot.

Vichy, the small, green and relaxed French town where I hail from, is not just the most livable place on earth, with its huge landscaped parks hugged by an artificial lake, it is also one of the most handsome. Outside its small and picturesque medieval core, it is a perfectly preserved jewel of 19th century spa architecture. It is playful and eclectic–it has Flemish palaces, neo-Gothic mansions, Venetian Palazzos, Moorish fortresses, Alpine chalets, and a spectacular Art Nouveau opera house. But it is also coherent as a whole, partly because most of it was built around the same time.

So I was understandably proud when the excellent people at the Vichy tourism office reached out to me this winter after seeing an Instagram post I’d made showing bits of a structure they knew well displaced to a strangely foreign environment.

The building is one of Vichy’s many concert kiosks, where bands play al fresco during the summer months to entertain residents and tourists at apéritif time. It is both modern–made of modular cast-iron elements assembled together like Lego–and quaint, with its repeated motif of stylized waterfalls that play on the town’s famed medicinal springs.

It turned out the kiosk, one of Vichy’s largest and most elegant, had been intended for a different location but was later moved to its current home in a quiet corner of the lakeside Bourrins park.

This sparked the idea of a series of images featuring the building in a number of decidedly non-Vichy locations–hot desert, grassy highlands, lush forest, icebergs–which the city would publish in the glossy architecture magazine it publishes once a year.

The magazine’s publication this week marks the end of a fun three-month project and a bit of a different take on my old obsession about historic landmarks and CG (I have a separate but related obsession with unbuilt architecture, on which more very soon).

As should be obvious by now if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, these are full-CG scenes.

You can see a digital version of the magazine as well as past issues here, and the tourism office will even mail you a hard copy if you leave your details. Below are the rest of the images, including some unpublished ones. Hope you enjoy and, as always, I’m grateful for your feedback or any thoughts about turn-of-the-century architecture, European spas, and music kiosks.

After some weeks spent playing with monumental things (more on this later), I felt like a change of scale.

This doodle started with an exercise in improving my glass shaders and models and, as these things do, gradually morphed into a little scene using a mix of new and existing assets, some of which you will have noticed in other places.

Technically, the modeling was done in 3ds Max, with some Agisoft Photoscan scans cleaned up and retopoed in ZBrush. I also used Substance Painter to paint displacement maps for the glass bottles and texture the spoon and other metallic objects. The floorboards and the fabric were scanned with Dabarti Capture, with the scans touched up in Affinity Photo, and the smoke was done with Phoenix FD. The sugar on the wood boards is a TyFlow particle system. In the jar, it’s a Forest Pack object. The rendering was done in V-Ray Next GPU and post-production is in ArionFX.

Clay and wire renders below. Let me know in the comments what you make of it or if you have any question.