Architectural visualization these days can be a very lucrative business with projects that range from $100 to $10,000. The rise in demand for more realistic conceptualization of buildings immediately outdated programs like AutoCAD, which had previously been used for both the visualization and planning stages of the design.

To be blunt, potential customers want to see something that looks real when they are buying something that hasn’t been built and architects want to display something that doesn’t look like Play-Dough.

A real leap with realism comes from 3DSMAX and VRay, which has an increased artistic flexibility to create better images. But first, as my disclaimer I must assume you have at least some basic knowledge of 3DSMAX to begin with and can navigate around the program a bit.

We’ll begin by creating something relatively simple. In a business setting you’ll often be given floor plans, but in our case we’ll use an image of one building from the Bauhaus movement in ‘20s Germany which spawned tons of cute little minimalist chairs.

Perspectives & polygons

Step One: Click your front viewport, then go to Views>Viewport Background. Save and then find the reference photo on your hard drive. Click match bitmap to ensure the image has the same proportions as the original. Check lock pan/zoom to ensure the image stays in one place while you’re working in the viewport’s space. Naturally, check display background.

Step Two: Under the create tab on the right side of the program, under the geometry rollout, drag out a box the size of the first column of windows. Since the building repeats itself, we’ll duplicate the other four later.

Step Three: Right click on the box and go to convert to editable poly. Editable poly allows much better control over the mesh. In the right hand column of your workspace, go to the modify tab with the box selected. Click polygon under the selection rollout. Right now you’re going to want to make vertical cuts where the windows are using slice plane under the edit geometry rollout. Go to your front viewport and hit control+a which is the hotkey to select everything. You can only use the slice tool on selected facets in the polygon mode. Use the following images red lines as to where to make the horizontal slices in the polygons, use the blue for the vertical. Don’t worry about even spacing just yet since the image is skewed.

Step Four: Now go into the vertex selection and you’re going to want to size up your windows neatly. Right click on the move button on the tool bar to get into exact measurements. You can also use exact measurements for rotation and scale in the same way. From now on you’ll be using the background image more or less just as a lose guide. I’ve cleaned up my slices a bit, that’s something that comes with experience so don’t worry too much about it, but you should have something that looks like this:

Step Five: Windows and the balcony are probably the most difficult part of this project. We’ll start with the balcony. Make another horizontal slice under the doorway to where the balcony is. Click polygon selection and hold control to select each balcony individually. In the edit polygons rollout, hit extrude and give them some good depth. I’ve done a little extra research on the exterior of the building, noting the image you can see there is a little lip on the balcony we need to add before we move to the railing.

Apparently this fellow found out how much his post-war money was worth.

Step Six: Explaining this process with words is fruitless, so here’s an animated gif that will simplify the extrusion, chamfer process:

Railing about rendering

Step Seven: Now it’s time to create the railing. The simplest way to use this is the line tool which can be found under the create tab under shapes with the rollout tab selected to splines. In your top viewport hold shift, then drag out lines a little wider than the side of the balcony. Go back to the modify tab and select the outer two vertices. Under the geometry rollout, go to fillet and drag up and down until it looks about right. At the top under the rendering rollout, check both renderable and display render mesh. This turns the line into a piece of sweet malleable geometry. Use this same technique on the other two bars and size them accordingly, but not as thick as the top bar.

Step-Eight: Now it’s time to add the detailing to the railing. The side bar has a slight curve at the bottom. The best way to do this is the bend modifier under the modify drop down box. See the animated gif. The last part is adding what the railing sits in, which is a simple object.

Step-Nine: With the railings complete it’s time to move on to the windows. Use the following steps.

Step-Ten: Add the actual window, a box, and duplicate the frame down the structure. Then, group and duplicate the piece of the building horizontally. Select all the objects, go to group, and then hold shift and drag with the move tool. The duplication dialog will come up, simply hit okay. Using the reference picture as a guide, change the bottom row of windows. Again you’ll want to delete the polygons which touch, then weld the vertices of the building. Chamfer the building, window frames and the balcony slightly. In real life there are no perfect edges, this adds a component of realism to your work. Your building should look like this when these steps are completed.

Step-Eleven­: At this point it’s not uncommon for your computer to become bogged down by the polygons in the scene when rotating your viewport. To stop this, tap O to turn on adaptive degradation. When you rotate, the viewport scene will turn to a bounding box when moved and be quicker.

Curve your NURBS

Step-Twelve: The curtains look harder than they are. Go to create, shapes, NURBS curve, and click point curve. Create squiggly lines, about the same distance, and about the same width. Move one above the other and go to the modify panel. You should see a small green box, click it and up comes the NURBS utilities box. Attach the two lines to one another, and then click the create blend surface button. Click the bottom curve, then the top. This will create a curtain like surface. Create about three or four different variations with different lines.

Step-Thirteen: Place the curtains in the windows with various widths in the windows of the buildings. You can use the scale tool to make them thinner if need be. Try not to duplicate the same placement again and again. Flip them 180 degrees for variation if need be.

Step-Fourteen: This step requires more attention than others because it’s abstract. This preps the modeling aspect of the building for rendering. Since we’re only viewing this one side, we’ll need a blank wall on one side where the sun will come from, a roof, and rooms for the windows. Make a slice at the top and side of the building and extrude backwards, extrude the top trim forward a bit.

For the mock rooms, create a box, delete the front facet, select all the polygons and hit flip under edit geometry and place it around each window.

Set up VRAY

Step-Fifteen: Now our modeling is done, let’s set up VRay. I’ll make this part generic to suite most versions of VRay. Go to Render>Renderer>Common>Assign Renderer and set VRay as your rendering program. Use the following settings.

Step-Sixteen: The lighting is also equally simple. With the global illumination from VRay all we need is a background color and sunlight. Go to Render>Environment and set the background color a sky blue. If you want to get fancy, you can do a gradient map and make it go from lighter blue to darker blue for added realism. See the image below for the placement of the sunlight and the settings. Go to create>systems and then daylight. Once created, change it to manual and turn off the skylight.

Step-Seventeen: The scene uses olyn three simple materials with one bump map. Be sure to check ‘affect shadow’ on the glass material, otherwise the light won’t go onto the curtains or into the rooms. Assign to the objects correctly to each material. The building itself will need a UVW map which can be added in the modify stack. Set it to box, with a size of 25×25x25. The bump map will only really show up in larger renderings of the image.

Click here to view the bump map.

Step-Eighteen: The last step is simply picking a camera angle for the building. I did one that was similar to the original, only tiled up a bit. Click render and wait for your final image.

But wait, there’s more

Step-Nineteen: I lied, there’s one more step. A little bit of post-program work can really help sharpen the look of your image. Here for my final image you can see how it was greatly enhanced in terms of realism. All I did was add a bit of noise in Photoshop (Filter>Noise>1%), then sharpen (Filter>Sharpen), added a bit of contract (Contrast +10), and increased the yellow light of the highlights, then saturated the image by -35.)

If you have any questions or run into problems, feel free to ask about it in our forum.