It’s been a while since my last reconstruction of an existing building. But this one turned out to be a lot more complicated than most of my previous picks. I’ll get to why shortly but first, a few lines about the building.
Cinephiles may know it as one of the most iconic locations in The Big Lebowski. In the real world, the John Lautner-designed house is the property of James Goldstein, who recently bequeathed it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was first built in 1961 but was significantly–and almost continuously–altered by Goldstein, working with Lautner, after he bought it in 1972.
It’s a daring design for the 60s. And the near absence of a 90-degree angle is what made it so hard to model (a lot of time spent working in local coordinates). There aren’t that many good blueprints around either, but luckily, the house is very well documented in photographs, which provided invaluable clues for the project.
It’s not a complete scene by any means. The lower floor with the bed and the photogenic deck overlooking the LA skyline is entirely missing. So is the car deck at the back of the house and most of the living quarters behind the kitchen.
Because of the scale of the building, I had to take some shortcuts, for instance texturing most of my assets with triplanar, dirt and distance maps rather than UVing everything as I normally tend to do. Most of the vegetation is roughtly eyeballed rather than meticulously researched.
Working on the GPU, I had to keep a close eye on my poly and texture budget. But fitting what is a relatively big scene onto my two 2080tis (with NVlink) wasn’t much of a problem. Apart from some camera angles featuring particles with motion blur, everything rendered without complaint.
All the vegetation was done from scratch in GrowFX. The rocks and natural features were photoscanned from nature, and the furniture was modeled in 3ds Max, Marvelous Designer and ZBrush. The carpets were done with ItooSoft’s RailClone and the vegetation was scattered with Forest Pack, using the hand-painting tool. The daylight shots are lit with a V-Ray sun/sky system and the evening ones with a Peter Guthrie sky.
V-Ray did a great job rendering these quickly (under an hour per image at 2k). I only missed the availability of the volume material on the GPU, which would have helped a lot with the pond water in the patio. I also wish we had Corona’s caustics for the pool.
Below a few more shots. Feel free to comment and ask any question.
First of all, congratulations on the work you have done, you are a true inspiration. I have a technical question I’d love to see cleared up for you. How do you get a translucency effect on the leaves of the trees with GPU NEXT? The way I do it on the CPU needs both Vray2sideMtl (to control more or less translucency) and the VrayMtl itself translucency parameter to control the color of translucency. Since we don’t have translucency on GPUs VrayMtl yet, I’d like to know how do you control translucency colors since we don’t have translucency on VrayMtl. I’ve spent many hours working around without satisfactory results…
bello, bello, bello..
Amazing work. Very impressed by your foliage. Do you hand paint a translucency map for the VRay 2-sided material (assuming that’s what you’re using)? Do you go with a grey that nets out at 128, 128, 128 or do you prefer different settings for good translucency? Also, with your Physical Cam, do you use aperture settings? Do you have any tuts for your setup as far as these things go? Blown away by this, seriously.
Ok. I will think about it. It would need a lot of cleaning up to make it a proper commercial scene so unlikely to be happening any time soon.
I second the latest request, could you please put this scene up for sale?
Beyond fantastic. Would you consider selling this one (both day and night scenes)?
Just an interesting fact: The Sheats Goldstein Residence (which is what this house is referred to as), is literally a stones throw from 10050 Cielo Drive, the residence of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski where the Manson Murders occurred. You can see the Benedict Canyon area in the movie ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’.
Prolific as usual B, & I like what Aerowalk says I read 8GB typical in the frame buffer (with NVLink +2×2080 Ti’s). I hope its set right for VRAY maybe its not doubling the GB guage only as should, its just reading the 1st card in the GB value as 8GB. I read almost everything on line to check if there is some Windows/vray setting…? Typical scene render crashes when the (GPU) VFB frame buffer 8GB apparent max level is reached. Any check special test for dummies you know of to verify the full Usage if true 16-18GB is available? Keep posting all these goodies I check often.
@Jamison, sorry for the late reply.
– I use the effect tab, but the camera settings for it don’t matter afaik since these are strictly post effects. You can find a ton of settings in there regarding the shape of the iris, etc. I find the default settings work fine most of the time but only if you have realistic light intensity settings in your scene.
– I almost always model the chamfers myself (or use sub-d modeling). I only use edgetex if I have very large structures for which modeling the chamfers would be too onerous or when my poly budget is very limited. Even so, the models would have to be at a certain distance as edgetex rarely completely fools the eye when seen close.
– I don’t modify the hdri. No need for this since you can tweak white balance and intensity in VRay. I normally use references and start from realistic camera and artificial light settings and then tweak my hdri settings to match. If needed to, I’ll tweak the temperature of the artificial lights. But I also understand why some people might want to add blue light for artistic effect. I’m more interested in plausibility.
Some technical curiosities:
– Do you use effects tab to add the glare effect? If so, what are your camera settings? I have a hard time making this look good.
– Do you use EdgeTex to add chamfers or model them in? This is a little joke debate at the office, I model them in myself.
– Your evening shots look correct, do you modify your HDRI? A lot of CG artists show blue light illuminating their night shots, but your’s is correct, with the background appearing dark.
@Marco: Indeed. I found some blurry plans online, no elevations, but tons of photos.
@Gerardo: Thanks much. V-Ray has pretty good VRAM stats in the VFB to track your consumption. That helps quite bit. Also, after a while you get a feel for it.
Wow is this the location of Jackie Treehorn?One of my favourite films.Where you found some schematic?
Amazing work Bertrand, loving those exterior shots and the indoor materials are amazing.
I have been using cpu rendering on vray for some time but gpu rendering has been in my mind for some time after seeing fstorm, octane and now vray gpu. How do you control the memory limits of gpu rendering? And how do you know how much gpu memory you are using in your scene?
big fan of your work
Cheers and keep up the amazing work!
Shut Up ! Get Out !
Hi Bertrand,
This is one of my favorite houses and especially notable for me as a feature in many music videos…
That said are you considering selling this one as I would love to use it a digital set piece for a video work.
Cheers
Nic
Thanks @Manuel. It may look like more than it actually is. The scene is dense but pretty compact. You can see higher-res images on Flickr by clicking on the images above. For caustics, I thought about running the scene through Corona, but in the end I faked them with a projector light, which wasn’t entirely successful.
Not sure how long it took me. I must have worked on it for about two months, a few hours at a time two to three days a week. I could have gone on forever but decided to cut some corners and post it.
This is insanity. When I read the list of what you all did for this, one would think that you spent an entire year on making it!
How many hours did it take, do you think?
It’s absolutely beautiful. Would love to see some high Res images.
For the caustics, you could go back into cpu and just render out a caustics pass and comp it in. Would be nice enough. Caustics right are a little bit of a pain though. But why stop suffering after having gone through all of what you have done so far? 😀
Thanks @Aerowalk. Yes, NVlink Pools the memory so you get 16-18GB with 2x 2080ti. But that’s only if the renderer supports it. V-Ray does, but I don’t know if FStorm does. You should ask Andrei before you buy. Without NVlink you can only access the VRAM from the smallest card in your rig.
Hey Bertrand. Stunning work as always! Really wish VRay GPU supported caustics, it would be such a difference…
The question is – you wrote you use 2 x 2080 Ti with NVLink. Does NVLinks summarise the GPUs memory, do you get about 18-20 Gb of VRam ? Or is it still 8-9 Gb ? (I work with FStorm and it displays that I have max 8,9 Gb of VRam on Windows 10, so I suppose same happens in VRay)
Asking another way – is it worth buying ? 🙂 ( I use 2×1080 Ti at the moment )