Hi, Some images of an imaginary place I am creating as a set for some futures adventures of my favourite characters.
Milton Manor, Wiltshire UK.
More images and full resolution coming here :
http://3d-synthesis.com/64-MiltonManor.html
Modelled in Blender 2.70/2.71 - Rendered in Octane. The weeping willow is a mix of one I made with Onyx garden and an Xfrog model. Everything else is pure Blender modelling.
Really nice work. Love the composition of the bottom two shots, very subtle. One thing i’d look at is reducing the yellow in the colour balance. Pure blue skies often lead to more or less pure white light. The modeling is superb, the willow looks great up close. Thumbs up.
Hello Roubal, you work continues to get better and better. At first glance I thought you were posting your reference picture. Looks very good, except for the over saturated sky.
Hi, I agree with both comments. I will try to use an other film template or a neutral setting for the camera color balance.
Currently, the sky and the far background behind a row of real trees are two mapped large cylinders with respective radius of 200 and 400 meters. As I can’t desaturate a texture inside Octane (I can only play with power and gamma) , I will make a desaturated version of the sky texture. I could just reduce the value on the blue channel of the texture in Octane, but it would darken instead of desaturating.
This is nice! How long have you been working on this?
Around two weeks for the manor and the vegetation, much more on the cars, as accurate documentation is very rare and I modelled only from photos. I had to gather hundreds of reference photo to get every detail and right proportions.
It is far from finished.
Sorry for double post, something weird occured when I validated it.
I have updated the images with the sky desaturated as well as the yellow color. I will render without film type next time. The previous balance color was simulating a Kodak gold 200 film if Iam not wrong. It increases the yellow a lot.
More images here :
http://3d-synthesis.com/64-MiltonManor.html
FANTASTIC work, no 2 looks very very relistic. congrats.
maybe just me, but the bricks look just a little bit too big.
shaun
edit: i really feel this deserves some stars.
Hi Shaun, I remember a similar discussion about english bricks dimensions in the past. I don’t remember if it was with you. I looked at many photos of english georgian houses, and observed that in most cases, the windows were 3 bricks wide. It is the references I used. My bricks are even a bit smaller. But maybe my windows are to large ?
I will check :
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/content_images/fig/1100120403003.png
Wikipedia :
[TABLE=“class: wikitable”]
United Kingdom
8½ × 4 × 2½ in
215 × 102.5 × 65 mm
[/TABLE]
In England, the length and width of the common brick has remained fairly constant over the centuries (but see brick tax), but the depth has varied from about two inches (about 51 mm) or smaller in earlier times to about two and a half inches (about 64 mm) more recently. In the United Kingdom, the usual size of a modern brick is 215 × 102.5 × 65 mm (about 8 [SUP]5[/SUP]⁄[SUB]8[/SUB] × 4 [SUP]1[/SUP]⁄[SUB]8[/SUB] × 2 [SUP]5[/SUP]⁄[SUB]8[/SUB] inches), which, with a nominal 10 mm ([SUP]3[/SUP]⁄[SUB]8[/SUB] inch) mortar joint, forms a unit size of 225 × 112.5 × 75 mm (9 × 4 [SUP]1[/SUP]⁄[SUB]2[/SUB] × 3 inches), for a ratio of 6:3:2.
My bricks length/height proportions are approximative (sometimes stretched abit to adjust the UV mapping). Some image I found seem to show smaller bricks at first glance, but it is often because they show bricks placed alternatively ar 90°, as there are several ways to use bricks. I also noticed that images were more attractive from distance if bricks are still visible.
American bricks dimensions are smaller. When searching reference images about georgian houses on Google, it is easy to recognize US and UK houses by the bricks dimensions.
[TABLE=“class: wikitable”]
United States
7⅝ × 3⅝ × 2¼ in
194 × 92 × 57 mm
[/TABLE]
I don’t even know what to say. My mind is blown. If I tried to go 15% near this detail my laptop would crash. (Weak laptop)
@MetalGlass : Octane is a GPU render engine. The scene currently requires around 1500 MB of Vram with the cars. I have a 7 years old Intel Quad QX9650 with 8 GB of Ram on an Asus P5k motherboard. 8GB is the very limit to manage 3GB of Vram (rendering on two external GTX 580 3GB in a Cubix Xpander pro 2 case).
A bench in the garden. Maybe the stone would have to be more grainy. It is difficult to adjust as the rendering is progressive and very grainy at the beginning.
The rendering isn’t the first thing that came to mind when I seen this, but it’s the overall density of the environment. How many polygons does the entire scene take up? Also maybe try to darken the bench, just a tad, or darken the faded areas, it looks perfect though. And you have a 7 year old Intel Core 2 QX9650 Quad? Wow. I wish I something like that lol. I currently have an extremely low end Intel Pentium B940 Mobile dual core processor. Despite the cores, this has no difference from the 10+ year old Pentium 4 HT at 2.80Ghz. How does your computer perform on this scene?
@MetalGlass : The scene is not really heavy for the computer when I work with Blender. The main reason that pushes me to render with Octane Standalone, instead of Cycles or even Octane pluging within Blender is that at rendering time, only the render engine is running.
It requires much RAM to manage data before filling the GPUs Vram (This process is called voxelization) but very few CPU ressources.
My scene is modular : each big object in Blender is exported separately in OBJ format with a specific exporter for Octane. All complex objects that are repeated several times are exported as instances and declared in a scatter file (.csv) Objects and scatter files are seen as nodes in a peculiar node tree structure in Octane (very powerful vertical tree structure that is much more friendly and intuitive than Blender/Cycles nodes).
So, heavy scenes in Blender can be made of many independent files that can be exported in OBJ and gathered and assembled in Octane. These objects, once their materials are set up in Octane can be exported in orbx format to be reused in other Octane scenes !
Currently, with 4 cars, the scene weights 1950.9 MB in Octane and is composed of 7 586 825 triangles. Including instanced objects, the scene contains 261356 objects.
@Speed777777: Hi Shaun, I checked my brick Template, and you were right, it is a bit too big. I am currently remapping. It looks a bit weird to me as i was already used to bigger bricks…
Wow this is fantastic looks very realistic.
Thank you very much ! I am improving slowly the set, adding détails here and there. I will have to remove the cars for some shots, as I have to save graphic memory amount to include characters later.
These are absolutely amazing they look so real although I think you need to sack the gardener and get a new one the grass on those little ornamental lawns is way too long and straggly. Not a criticism of your grass, my lawn looks just like that but I haven’t had the mower out for three weeks 
For a well kept house like that you should be thinking bowling green rather than the rough on the local golf course.
AhAh, If you look at the left corner of the very first image of this page, down the angle of the house : You will see the lawn mower, ready to be used !
I had noticed the mower 
The long grass does look realistic but just a little out of place.
I have a big problem that I should have seen sooner… The brick texture scale problem could have been a clue, but I passed aside without seeing the point : The problem was not actually with my bricks scale. At some moment a scale accident surely occured to my blender file, and the whole building has a problem of scale.
I noticed it this night when rendering the night view below, looking at the front door : it is around 3.10 meters tall ! It should be 2.10m x 1m. The distance between the front and rear wheels of the Lotus Elan is 2.13m : it is what made me see the flaw ! 
I have to adjust the scale to get the right width and see if the height is correct or adjust it. Then, if the manor looks too small in width, I will add one window column on each side…
