Riverside House in Blender Cycles

A standard requirement for external architectural visualization projects is to use grass, plants or any vegetation in the surroundings. For that kind of project, you should find a technique or resource that helps you to create such type of “natural resource.”

Do you want to see a project that uses that type of resource to create beautiful vegetation around an architectural project?

Here is another great example of artwork related to architectural visualization in Blender. Coming from the 3d artist, Helmy Ardiansyah is the Riverside House in Blender Cycles.

The artist shared images of the project on both BlenderArtists and ArtStation. Did the artist use any unique tool to create the grass and vegetation? From the description, you will find that Grasswald is the Add-on of choice for this project.

If you visit the project page on either the BlenderArtists or ArtStation, you will also find some of the settings used to render the scene. An excellent resource for anyone willing to learn how to create similar renders.

According to the artist's description, the primary hardware used to render the scene is a GeForce GTX 1060. Using that GPU to render the scene took about 2.5 hours to get the final image in 1200 x 1600 pixels.

How about the samples? From the screenshots provided by the artist, you will spot 1200 samples in the render settings. Unfortunately, no information about the use of Denoiser or filmic.

An interesting aspect of the render, which you will find in the forum thread is the render passes. The artist made passes for Ambient Occlusion, Glossy Direct, Mist and Glossy Indirect.

For the post-production, the artist uses Affinity Photo.

Another great resource to create grass for architecture in Blender is the Grass Free Add-on, which also gives you incredible results and it is free. We posted a quick guide about grass for architecture in Blender, just a couple of days ago.

And here is a project that does use the Grass Free to create all the grass surrounding a house. The project is the Rural House also rendered in Cycles. Guess who the author of the Rural House is? Yes, another great piece of artwork from Helmy Ardiansyah.