Hi there !
I just finished the first phase of my current personnal project : re-creation of the Te Kaitaka house, designed by the Stevens Lawson Architects. I’m a huge fan of their work and style. Regarding this particular house, you may have seen it if you watched the show called “The Most Extraordinary Houses in the World” (available on Netflix here). If you want to check out the original house : https://www.stevenslawson.co.nz/proj…anaka-retreat/
The building is nested into the landscape, and is all about the view and unusual angles. Entirely made of wood and concrete, it’s a very organic house, yet with geometric shapes everywhere. I found it to be the perfect test subject for a first attempt at a large scale indoor/outdoor archviz project.
https://i.imgur.com/88yQVXz.jpg
Without DWG or high res floorplans, I resorted to a bit of guess work regarding angles and sizes, especially for the roof (both interior and exterior). Surrounding landscape was recreated from heightmaps, and modeled around the house to match the reference pictures. No Unreal landscape here, as that’s a workflow I’m not familiar with, but a few meshes with vertex painted textures.
I experimented with different lighting setups, and finally settled for a moody, foggy dusk. Especially as this was a good occasion to play with interior lights.
This also allowed me to revert to a fully static lighting (directionnal + skylight), with foliage only using the volumetric lightmaps samples and SSAO. There are 2 types of post-processes, for interior and exterior, mainly for disabling SSAO inside and tuning the exposition.
https://i.imgur.com/rSro0Ia.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/jHjdjdE.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/5OVEDTO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/IOSTovb.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/BnrqpVA.jpg
The wooden cladding was a particular aspect on which I spent quite some time, as it’s the most present element in the house, both inside and outside. I tried different materials in Substance, to mimic the cladding effect, but it wasn’t convincing enough, especially in VR (a VR version is the end-goal of the project). In the end, every piece of wood was modeled, and I used a single wooden texture. I applied a gradient to the texture, and unwrapped the wood cladding in such a way that no adjacent pieces would end up next to each other on the UV map : this gave me the variation in color I was looking for, with a very cheap shader. The main drawback is the moire effect that can show up under certain angles.
https://i.imgur.com/fEpURjb.jpg
The interior was pretty straightforward, except for the roof that needed 5 or 6 versions until it was coherent with all my ref pictures from different angles. I also reduced the scope a bit, keeping only 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom (from 4 and 4), and ditching the utility rooms and garage.
Chairs, diner table and beds are from my furniture database, along with most of the adornments. All other furnitures were modeled from scratch to match the references as close as possible (including paintings and speakers), with the stairs and the David Trubridge’s Snowflake light pendant as the central pieces (it’s in pretty much every room of the house). Hero elements (sofas, kitchen isle, paintings) were textured into Substance Painter, while the rest of the meshs are using a mix of assets from Unreal Studio, Substance Source and Megascans. As with a large part of this project, the spotlights intensity and position were eyeballed.
https://i.imgur.com/NgJSMmC.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/vVejHwN.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/W29Jbj7.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/QDhctog.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/RFb1wDh.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/eI7bIk8.jpg
For the next phase, I’ll have to dive into optimizing the hell out of it, to reach VR-friendly performance levels. Atlasing textures, merging meshes, and improving LODs are on the to-do list. And I’d like to make a version with a noon lighting setup, which will require directional lights, DF shadows, and improved foliage. Not sure I’ll be able to retain the interior quality with such a setup, so we’ll see how it goes ! In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedbacks 