Gallery

Bertrand Benoit

Cinephiles may know it as one of the most iconic locations in The Big Lebowski. In the real world, the John Lautner-designed house is the property of James Goldstein, who recently bequeathed it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was first built in 1961 but was significantly–and almost continuously–altered by Goldstein, working with Lautner, after he bought it in 1972.

This is my full-3D interpretation of this fascinating building and part of series of a dozen images.

It’s a daring design for the 60s. And the near absence of a 90-degree angle is what made it so hard to model (a lot of time spent working in local coordinates). There aren’t that many good blueprints around, but luckily, the house is very well documented in photographs, which provided invaluable clues for the project.

Because of the scale of the building, I had to take some shortcuts, for instance texturing most of my assets with triplanar, dirt and distance maps rather than unwrapping everything as I normally do. The vegetation is built from scratch in GrowFX but roughly eyeballed rather than meticulously researched.

The rocks and natural features were photoscanned from nature, and the furniture was modeled in 3ds Max, Marvelous Designer and ZBrush. The carpets were done with ItooSoft’s RailClone and the vegetation was scattered with Forest Pack, using the hand-painting tool.

Working on the GPU, I had to keep a close eye on my poly and texture budget. But fitting what is a relatively big scene onto my two 2080tis (with NVlink) wasn’t much of a problem. Apart from some camera angles featuring particles with motion blur, everything rendered without complaint.