The basic house shape is derived from a simple box primitive. To remove the windows I just deleted the desired polys.

Added the balcony roof and the door shelter, along with the steps to the front door. The shelter and roof are simple cylinders with the slice on to 180 degrees. The front door steps are 3 polys cut into the base of the house and the extruded to form the steps.

Here I added the end tower or rounded wing. This again was a cylinder with the slice set to 180 degrees. The window openings are deleted polys. The window frames in the towers are shapes created from the splines between the polys. As the windows curve around this was the simplest and easiest method to create the frames. Rather than using the window primitive and trying to bend them around.

I added a planter next to the front steps. A box primitive with the top poly cut using inset, then extruded down. I also added the poles that support the balcony roof. Both just simple cylinders.

Here I added the front garden and gravel drive. Because I wanted specific shapes for both I used the spine tool with the corners set to bezier corner. This gave me more freedom to alter the shape later If I wasn't happy with the result.

Here I added more window frames for the second tower. Both doors using the door primitive.

I started the window frames here using the window primitive (fixed). The for sale stand. The art deco decoration or moulding was simple boxes tapered with the taper modifier. Then grouped together.

So all the frames are in. The decoration and the steps and bushes. I decided at this point to leave the geometry blocky at the top of the towers as though this was intentional decorative brickwork.

So now it was time to setup the scene. I used the basic cylinder for Background image. Adding a target direct light to simulate the sun with a multiplier of 3.0. The Vray camera took a bit of practice to get the right exposure. But in the end I used an ISO of 200, A shutter speed of 200ths and an F-number of 3.3. The reason for such large aperture settings is because Vray camera is designed to work primarily with Vray sun, which is much brighter in intensity than a target direct light.

So now we come to the render settings for this scene. I wanted a high quality image, but not at the expense of render times. So for this reason I chose to use an Irradiance map as my primary bounce and light cache for the secondary bounce. These are the settings for the irradiance map. You will note that HSsubdivs are the same as the interpol samples. I wanted a fairly accurate primary bounce but also wanted Vray to have some flexibility in guessing the interpolation between the samples. So I allowed Vray to use 30 samples for guessing the interpolation and 30 subdivs to be bounced from the Hemisphere, this has given a reasonable render, but still room for improvement if required.

These are the light cache settings for the secondary bounce of the GI. I used 1500 subdivs with a sample size of 0.02. I could alter the sample size and subdivs to increase the quality but at the expense of render times. In a real world situation I would tend to use 2500 subdivs to allow a more accurate secondary bounce on the GI

Here are the image sampler, environment, and color mapping rollouts for Vray. I used an adaptive DMC for the anti aliasing, although not happy, I didn't want to use fixed or adaptive subdivision,, if doing an interior then fixed would be good because of the detail enhancement. The environment was left at the default, but because I have changed my gamma settings to 2.2 I darkened the bluesness of GI slightly. The color mapping allows me to control the brightness/darkness of certain areas of the image. For this scene I wanted to have some flexibility because it's an external shot. I chose the reinhard mapper with a burn value of 0.6 this gives me control between linear and adaptive.

Here's the adaptive DMC rollout. This is for the antialiasing of the image. I set it to fully adaptive. Although there is still some sharp edges, If I messed around with the settings I would have ended eventually with highly detailed edges. But again at the cost of render times.

In max 2011 there is a new material editor called "Slate" this gives me the ability to edit my materials in a node based environment. The next few screens are self explanatory, they show the material used and the nodes attached to them.

The for sale material.

The background, or sky material

The ivy material, this material is default for a plugin called "growIVY" from guruware. it is a free plugin available for download from guruware site of scriptspot. This is the plugin I used to grow the ivy up the gable end of the house.

The material node for the grass.

The material node for the main building plaster.

The traditional material editor view, with the first six slots.

The second half of the material editor with the bottom six slots.

The final scene before rendering.

The for sale sign created in photoshop CS5, the rectangle shape tool for the border and simple times new roman font for the lettering.