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[m-spaces]

Hi,
currently rendering up an extension for a client, starting to get the hang of Vray and the various settings. Find it hard tho to get materials correct to match that of real world materials. Gonna get the company to buy the Vray super bundle, has any one any advice whether the help dvds are of any use.

Ive attached a pic of the current project, comments and advice are v welcome. Wanna get some plants trees around the building, are RPC plants best for this?

regards

Dan

[TheAllusionist]

Looking good. I would break up the paving with planters or something, kind of looks like the building was dropped there. If the glas is this transparent, I would put some furnishings inside.

The Gnomon Workshop videos are very well done.

[pradipta]

nice design. i guess the side and rear walls are not modeled. as Russell mentioned place some paving for the structure.

[d.sign]

Well, as for Vray and materials, I would disagree with you, I think Vray has easiest setup for good materials from all the render engines I know. Also, it will work even with standard Max amterials. You got free egz materilas on the Vray info site and it is good glass preset you can use. For other materials and setups for them, there is lot of tutorials out there, check out the thread at our site, we made quite a list of links to them: Vray tutorials - links
Vray materials round up
Also check out the evermotion free stuff section, there is Vray material library with lot of presets you can use.
As for the dvd help edition, best you can buy is Chris Nichols/Gnomon workshop double dvd with interior and exterior lightning setup lessons where you can find lot of techniques explained and also material setup. You can buy it over the VizMasters site with some discount I think... Price is more than reasonable for such great lessons...
As for your render, I think the light need a bit of work, you got strangely black cieling inside at the first floor, probably due to the overlapping planes at that place (Vray does that, if you have two objects that share same plane it will turn out black), also, no direct sunlight visible, or the shadows are too soft on it. Second, you need some enviroment, HDRI or plain bitmap sky to reflect in that glass.
As for materials, need some work on the bitmap textures, go for Arroway textures, you will find some great stuff there...
Ground level also need some articulation as Russell said.
As for the plants, you can use the bitmap textures and add them in Photoshop, not always necessery to render with plants (RPC got some issue with shadows, better use Xfrog or Onyx...). I ussually make it like that and eventually some planar maped trees if you need to cast shadow on the house. Shadow of tree can be mapped directly on the direct or spotlight and project it on the objects in scene...