Farnsworth House

This is the Farnsworth House near Chicago. It is very famous because it broke with tradition and even was tied up with the McCarthy era communist craziness in the USA. It took me about 16 hours to make including the tables and chairs.
Would love to hear your constructive critz! I am looking for freelance work, so if you have any or one anyone, please tell them about me and let me know!
Thanks!
Douglas E Knapp


look more closely at the travertine tiles. Curtains would also help a lot.
lighting is ok but there are no strong shadows from the sun. adding these would help i think
large panels of glass / large expanses of glass never give a completely smooth reflection. adding a slight noise bump can help improve the realism.
the grass also should be addressed. use a more realistic texture since this is such an important part of the scene in terms of the background and the reflections in the glass.

Other than that good first attempt. exterior renders are difficult. well done.


Thanks. This is an update. I have not posted it but I have fixed the sun shadow problem and the flat glass one. Curtains are in the todo but they are often not in pictures of the original but sometimes they are and they do look better. Curtains are also a lot of work and hard on the cpu. I have played with the grass but as of yet, I have not found a good way to do the grass without overloading my computer and spending ages rendering it. I guess I could use the grass pack from Mr. Price.

What do you not like about the travertine? I do think the flat light is killing it somewhat.

This house was a poor choice as a first house because unlike most houses you have too not only model the outside about also the inside no matter if you do an inside or outside shot.
Here is my first house. LOL


Hi, good job!
Have a look at the rendering of Farnsworth House by Allesandro Prodan - it is a great source of inspiration:
http://marlas.cgsociety.org/art/maya-after-mental-effects-ray-vegetation-mies-van-der-rohe-plants-interior-exterior-composition-sky-sun-farnsworth-house-3d-754315

WOW, That is crazy. One tree alone would be as much work as the house plus I see he did the whole kitchen and such. In my own defence I have one week per project at 20 minutes per day. I am sure his project must have taken months of 20 minutes days! :slight_smile:

Looking at my old house, I see it could be much better if just I redid the grass with Mr. Price’s trick of using maps to concentrate the grass up front and turned on the glass materials and make it cycles and used and HDRi sky map.

My farnsworth house needs grunge maps too.

this is how the tiles are
could either model or try a displacement map or a bump map to make realistic tiles. id advise modelling the tiles in the foreground. bump map for ones in the background if your pc is struggling…
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fn-j-t%2F9331056426&ei=BslRVevhNcTSU7bqgHg&bvm=bv.92885102,d.d24&psig=AFQjCNGj3MsxVBy0ERb5T2b20LuJYbP2rg&ust=1431509642395799
Try making/ downloading a seamless grass texture. apply it as a texture to the plane. use uv to scale the texture appropriately. If you can, post produce the grass coming up around the columns for more realism.
hope this helps :slight_smile:

How did you find these reference images?? They are great. I was working from much worse stuff. One I really need still is the roof.

I just googled farnsworth house travertine tiles :stuck_out_tongue:
the roof of this building is fairly boring. the horizontal aspect of this building and how it connects to nature is more interesting i think than birds eye views. If you want to do something really interesting have a read about how the surroundings flood - there might be something interesting in that…
if you haven’t already id recommend having a look at a few blender guru tutorials on texturing and adding dirt etc. to your textures.

The roof is interesting. It has odd structures up there. I did not do the grunge textures because it did not fit in my self given time limit. It would be better with them. There are also a lot of little details I could do like the fireplace or the kitchen and also the leather lounge . Might be fun to do an animation of the house going up on hydraulics to get away from the global warming floods that are destroying the house.
My time is currently being eaten by my BlenderGameMaster.com project. :slight_smile: