The aromatic garden

The aromatic garden

"Inside the house is hidden their little treasure, the place where they spend hours enjoying their passion for plants. A modest garden that floods the rooms with its aroma of mint and basil."

Architecture: Casa Claudia by Arturo Sanz and Fran López architects, located in Valencia, Spain.

The framing of the images is based on the original photography by María Mira.

I chose this small house because I fell in love with its courtyard, so I started to imagine what life could be like for the people who live there. That's how I came up with the idea of making an aromatic garden.

A place to enjoy day and night. I wanted to try two different types of lighting, one during the day, with the sun high, with no other light sources than a VRaySun, and one at night, combining artificial lighting in the interior.

Life inside the house revolves around the courtyard. The original space is conceived in this way and I wanted to reflect this in the lighting, the composition of the images and the setting. All assets have been carefully chosen to fit the story and mood. 

The making of

Architecture was modelled with 3dsmax and rendered with VRay. To scatter the vegetation I used Forest Pack and the postproduction is madre with Photoshop.

This is how I organised the workflow on this project: 

Since I had the reference framing, I first modelled all the architecture based on them. Then I tried different types of lighting to enhance the architecture and evoke the stories that the house suggested to me. Finally, I textured all the architectural elements and placed the chosen assets, most of them downloaded from Quixel Bridge and Polyhaven.

In the sliders you can see this proccess in reverse order, starting with the final render.

I found it very challenging to create the materials in these scenes. Specially the flooring and wall cladding made from machined pieces of terracotta. These are some examples of the materials I have created for this project.

Thank you so much for taking your time watching my project!

Feel free to leave a comment if you have some feedback. I truly appreciate it!