Texturing the stones along the front. Also the tiles. Placed a bit of dirt and vegetation around (weeds, twigs). Managed to get some nice reflections in the windows, and the curtains are improved.

Placed some stones along the front. Not sure how far to take them. Probably just a normal map will do. Modelled a pot for the plant. Wall has a bit of noisy bump. Maybe painted brick would look good. Plenty of houses around here like that. A light beside the door might be a nice idea too. And a door handle.  Details, details.

Combining a couple of previous themes. Plus the open window adds a touch of mystery to the scene. Or should that be voyeurism?

More modelling. Different plants, Bird of Paradise this time. Just exploring moods, colours. No actual texturing done yet. A bit more modelling to do.

Some more modelling plus a change of pot plants.

Here’s a scene I might be able to cope with – a front verandah very similar to mine. I’ve been reviewing the workshop I did with Leigh van der Byl a few years ago on Environmental Texturing, and I certainly feel that texturing is the biggest weakness in most Vue renders. So I plan to do a good job on this, and probably quite a few similar scenes as there’s lots of scope for variation.

This is a fairly early stage of the process. Have been modelling the building in Blender, still some details to go. Then actual texturing of the surfaces. This image is just the default material in Vue. The pot plant, a Yucca apparently, seems a reasonably good fit and there are one or two of them on front verandahs  around here . Not sure if I need to add something else.

Finally spent a bit of time on the house and garden scenario that I’ve been thinking about for some time.

I think I prefer this one.

I’ve sorted a couple of other issues in relation to camera projection, and I think I’ve now got it down. This statue is a photo, public domain, that I found on the web and brought into my scene. Statues could be really useful in garden shots. Need to keep the projecting camera in about the same place as the rendering camera, but use longer focal length to get the close up. That way the perspective is the same. And make the material single sided or strange shadows result.

Spent some time adding geo to the cabin and painting a better texture. Registration was no longer so good, and I had to do some scaling to get it to fit properly. Not sure what is causing the problem, just takes a bit more work to get it right.

Actually, after some more experimentation, it seems most sensible just to render from Vue to create the texture, and paint over that, rather than rendering from Blender. Not sure why I’m so keen on getting it to work by rendering from Blender.