Exterior lighting tests

This was some initial exterior renders to test lighting set ups and how the materials were rendering. My current hardware would not render full environments such as grass,trees,vegetation etc so I was forced to only render the building on top of a simple plain. This would allow me to extract the building and place it into a photograph that would act as the surrounding environment.7

At this stage the final design was not decided, this was simply testing my lighting and hdri set up. I downloaded a free to use hdri pack which is a set of skys with different lighting values and set at different times of the day with variations of cloud cover. This allowed me to light my house with a number of different looks, morning, dusk, night etc. 

I also added a vray light that acted as the sun within my scene, I could control which angle the sun would hit the house and also the length of shadow that was cast 

Proof of concept; placing a render into a photograph. With some basic Photoshop post works the house sat realistically within the scene. In Photoshop the reflections were added to the windows and shadows were added. These tests will become useful once I am placing my final design into a photograph.