Boulder Peak Apartments - Exterior and Site Model

Hello everyone,

Over the past couple of months, my wife, Kylie Garubba who works as an architectural designer here at the same office, started working on a design for 2 apartment buildings for a client here in New York. We had the opportunity of double teaming this project together. After helping out with the design and finishing up the exterior model, we were given a site survey with contour lines and parking layout which helped to produce the site model.

Below, I am proud to share the final concept renderings of the project!

Steven Garubba & Kylie Garubba

DeGraw & DeHaan Architects

Quote from v-cube

nice grass! sketchup/ skatter?

Thank you! Yeah i used Skatter with some megascan clumps of grass blended with Enscape grass. Really happy with how organically it came out.

Thank you everyone for your kind comments!

As for the grass setup, I am using Skatter with Sketchup along with the native Enscape grass at the default 30%/30% height and variation.

Programmed Skatter to point proxies on normals of the topography surface to add variation. You'll also see that I checked scale falloff on grass so that grass proxies scale down around the edges of the sidewalks.

Used 3 varieties of Megascan grass clumps:

Used 1 variety of Megascan basket grass at 5% probability:

Final tip: Always place some sort of objects or trees behind the camera and provide shadows on the foreground/grass area for added variation to your final image.

Best,

Steve

Quote from TowerPower

Amazing renders. Did you use transmutr to bring the grass into Sketchup? How's the performance?

Thanks! Yeah I used Transmutr to export from the Quixel bridge and save as a Sketchup model. It works like a charm and I highly recommend the workflow.

The performance was pretty decent in the beginning however I had to bring the density of clumps down once I got around to the back and had to cover more surface area. I believe I had to keep it below 40,000 objects in Skatter to hold high framerates.

Quote from TowerPower

Oh nice, that's encouraging to hear. Aside from the grass, are there any other assetts you've used from Quixel? What about their materials? They've obviously got a really great library.

I honestly thought I wasn't going to buy megascans because of all the random things they have like mushrooms and dead logs but they have a lot of different surfaces in there for archviz that are very high quality scans along with surface imperfections. The quixel mixer is also something I'm using now for creating different textures. You should definitely check it out!