This is a realistic exterior render in Maya of a tuscan villa called “Leopoldina” I made the 3d model using the poligonal modeling tools of Maya and the realistic rendered have been made in Mental Ray. The image is all 3D, no image is applied in post production.

To make the realistic garden I used my own collection of grass, flowers, plants and trees. I created these 3d models of plants and grass to make them look realistic without killing the rendering performances. All the texture are hand-made by me.

(3D Models and textures in Maya, exterior realistic render with Mental Ray | January 2013)

I saw this model as a render over the net made with 3d studio max and V-Ray, I tried to achive the same result with Maya and Mental Ray. So I remodel everything looking at existing renders, I had no technical documentation. The exciting part of this job was finding the way to handle millions of polygons, I thanked god for BSP2. I don’t know who wins between Mental ray vs V-Ray, but I’m pretty happy of my result.

(Models and textures in Maya, rendered with Mental Ray | July 2012)