Okay thanks, I will try this out.

I have quite a few houses I have made in the past, just messing around. I have at work now V-Ray for sketchup, and here is a render I have done of the first house.

I am wondering, and I promise I have looked to try and find out, how do people normally go about adding in backgrounds. I can add it in under the environmental tab, however the images always get blurry. Should I add more detail, like perimeter fence, or decorative landscape boxes so that the horizon line is hidden? Also for the renders do people usually take pictures of were the house will be put, or do you just find them on Google. I have searched everything from "HDRI panorama" to "sky tree horizon line". I have many spherical images, however they are basic studio lighting set ups, or something that gets blurry as I stated. ANY help will be immensely appreciated. Thanks so much.

Dan

Hey everyone. This is a first post, however I have stalked the forums forever reading and watching on all the projects you do. I am amazed at the work you all put out, it is very nice. I figured I would leave the dark room, and post a project I have started working on, a massive 1 day ago. I am always fascinated by futuristic cities, so I decided to make one in SketchUp and maybe render it in V-Ray or Lumion. I have both of these because of work (I am a fire protection enginerd so I am always modeling or drawing high rise buildings). So, below is the first completed building, started today and finished a few hours ago...darn meetings. I would like any thoughts you may have. Thanks so much everyone.

Basically I made the "foot" of the building first, then just polar arrayed it 4x in a 360° circle. The I drew a 6 sided shape slightly overlapping all 4 of the feet. I then cut the shape in half (unevenly) and extruded it up, offset, then extruded up again. I then simply drew tons of squares on the surface, and extruded them either in or out. I wanted to make sure that none were on the same plane, or at least close to none. I then just imported some textures from cgtextures, made them seamless in Photoshop, and made materials in VRAY. The last picture is a render with no displacement maps applied, basically just reflect maps. Tomorrow I will make displacement maps for the curtain wall part, which will help make it stand out more. The lighting is done through an HDR map, and I just left the background blank.

Thoughts? And thanks again!

Dan.