Hi Guys,
Thanks a lot for the feedback.
SandroP, llx66, weilynn: Thx guys, much appreciated.
Enrico: Cheers! Yes, this is all Vray standalone beta via Andrey’s wonderful script.
wizofboz: Thanks. I would have like to spend more time on this, but it was really stretching my system’s capabilities.
mr_archano, Acewings06: Hi guys. I’m not sure where I’d start a tut since most of what I do is just painstaking trial and error - as opposed to applying some secrete recipe that works all the time. Plus I’m still figuring out Vray. There’s so much still that doesn’t behave the way I would expect it to. But I’m happy to answer questions if you’re up against some specific problem. Just PM or email me.
Carbonflux: Cheers! Yes, now that you mention that, the last one is a little creepy. The parquet and the living-room floor textures were done in Blender and made tileable in Photoshop. Modelling the parquet and using this as a texture It’s the best way I’ve found of doing exactly the texture you need. You just need a solid, tileable wood or stone texture to start and a little bit of patience.
Hobo Joe: Thanks for the comments man. It really helps me zero in on the main problems. It’s hard to really “see” things after you’ve spend so much time staring at the same images. Some of what you’re pointing out has to do with poor post-prod (like saturation and DOF). I think the main issue as far as I’m concerned is the “flying furniture” effect: The fact that some images don’t seem to show diffuse shadows in indirectly-lit area. I’m using LDR images to light some of these images and this may be the reason (I don’t get this effect when using lamps to light a scene). The GI settings are quite high on the interiors, so I can’t imagine it comes from there. But you never know. As I said, I’m still kind of fumbling in the dark when it comes to Vray’s render settings.
Specular and reflectance maps also give me a headache. I never seem able to obtain the same result twice with identical settings. Sometimes (like on the leather in the first pic), they simply don’t work, giving me a buggy render whatever I do…
Carbonflux: The red chair should be about the right size. But I’m using a very long lens on this image (to justify the very shallow DOF) so there is a good deal of foreshortening going on, which might explain the impression, making the background furniture look a lot bigger than it actually is.
Cyborg Dragon: Yes, I do have quite a few Gigabytes of textures now, and I keep making new ones as I go along. I also have some Arroway CDs, which are really fantastic. The garden wall and the house wall are Arroway’s. I also try to archive all the models I make so that I can go back to them easily. The Thonet chair, for instance, I did about a year ago. The Eames lounge chair is also one of the first models I made (though I had to optimise it poly-wise for this render). The Brionvega is an old Nurbs model. As for plants, I have one Evermotion and a couple of XFrog collections I bought, plus a good bunch of free models I gleaned here and there on the web and from forums. I’d say half the trees here were downloaded for free (the XFrog public plant collection comes to mind). I did model one of the smaller trees too. I recommend XFrog, but not really the Evermotion models - they look fantastic but just way too big poly-wise for my taste.
Hobo Joe: right, apart from perhaps the first image, which is intended to be distorted and stylised, I was indeed going for realism, and if it didn’t turn out that way, it wasn’t intended. Hence my interest in your comments to make sure I improve on this.
tcrazy: Yes, the folds are a bit pronounced and also solid-looking, though I think I could have tackled that by scaling the texture a tad bigger and lowering the bump value. Right now it looks like ten dogs have spent the night in it.
Yes, the grass is Vray displacement.
And yes, I stole the inspiration from Archdaily (like a lot of other stuff before). The advantage is that they generally provide blueprints, which makes it easier to start with something quite close to the real proportions. Otherwise, I just take inspiration from books, ads, magazines… As I said, I’m still very much learning my way through this and I found that modelling and rendering from life was the best way to learn…
or maybe the mark a dogs nose leaves 
