Professional 3D Artist Created the White House From Scratch

Today, we are going to talk about a 3D Artist Created the White House From Scratch with a result that is just amazing.

Andre Cantarel is Los Angeles based 3D Generalist who has been working as Modeling/Lighting Lead and CG Model Supervisor for feature films including Aquaman, X-Men Dark Phoenix, Justice League, and more …

1. Method

From what I found, he did not say how long it took him to finish this personal project but he always says it took him too long, and by that, I would assume it might take him at least around one year to build entirely CGI White House mostly using 3ds Max and V-Ray with the help of Zbrush as well. Everything, including plants, was modelled and textured manually by the artist without any plant generator plugin, which is just incredible.

The 3D Artist Created the White House From Scratch as a personal project and went through the Library of Congress and found close-up photographs taken during a big building restoration that happened decades ago. He found a lot of angles that usually can’t be found.

When modelling something, Andre usually finds measurements, block low poly shapes in and double-check that everything fits together. It was a bit tricky in the beginning he said, as the White House is built on a small hill and the elevation changes of the terrain are built into the architecture. In the south, the first floor is at the same level as the ground but in the north, the same floor is underground. When you just start getting into this topic, it can be very confusing.

From what we can see, the modelling of the window frames and windowsills is quite simple! Andre said: “All you need is a spline that represents the side profile of the frame and a rectangle spline”. The Bevel Profile Modifier is possibly one of the greatest under-used features in 3ds Max – it makes such things super easy and allows you to get great UVs in one go.

3ds Max is great when it comes to using splines for modelling. Splines allow you to work very accurately as well as most of the parameters can be typed in using real-world units. His system units and display units are mostly set to centimetres. and If he needs to block in very large stuff he might switch to meters for a moment.

2. Materials

All the materials rely on tileable maps Andre created in Photoshop. They are often 8K, like the ones used for the plaster, for example. He simply mixed them in a composite map to get the right amount of microstructure and small cracks while avoiding tiling when you go a bit further away. Overall, everything was kept very simple and came down to a well-prepared base material.

For the White House, he did not use any scanned materials and worked in what you would call an “old-school” fashion.

Trees

For the trees he looked up what kind of trees there are in the White House yard, he googled some leaves of those specific trees, painted the textures in Photoshop and did a bit of modelling. Then, he filled a crude odd-shaped volume with a lot of leaves using a particle system to get the right density. Once he was done with that, he created a V-Ray proxy out of that geometry. Huge trees look almost like dense clouds so you need a lot of leaves.

You just need to type in the right number in the particle system for that. Everything is kind of simple but it seemed to work well enough in this case. Opacity maps slow down rendering a lot when you have such dense foliage. And he used full geo for leaves whenever he could.

The lighting was done using a high-res HDRI in the V-Ray Dome Light, a Target Direct with a very small soft shadow radius, and a bigger V-Ray Disk linked to the key light that affects specular and reflections (it helped him to have more control over the highlights on the greenery). Everything has been rendered in V-Ray 3.6.

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Even though The 3D Artist Created the White House From Scratch have spent a very long time working on this project, the result is just fantastic.

personal work like this can be a source of good additional income on the side. For example, you can sell it on an online 3D asset store and generate thousands of dollars per month.

Suit to my research, The 3D Artist Created the White House From Scratch and now he is selling it with all its asset for around $1800.
If you sell it once a month continuously it is going to help you pay rent for the next few years at least.

There are a lot of people who are willing to buy this work because it is very realistic compared to the other white house versions sold online and it can be easily used in big-budget Hollywood movies.

I hope that this article about The 3D Artist Created the White House From Scratch helped you learn a lesson on how can 3D design be a high-income side career.