In this short tutorial I will show you a way of creating a carpet in 3ds max using vray fur. Before I begin, I need to say that you need to use vray fur ONLY when you absolutely need it (when the camera is really close to that specific object that the vray fur is applied to, or if you need to render at a very high resolution); if not using vray displacement is the way to go. If you decide that you need that you need a very high level of detail in your rendering, than be prepared for higher rendering times.

First, create a plane at the desired dimensions. This will be your carpet.
With the plane selected, go to “Create > Vray > Vray Fur”
By default, the vray fur will be linked to your plane. Assign them a desired material (keeping both the plane and the vray fur gizmo selected) and leave all the rest of the parameters unchanged for the moment.
If you hit a test rendering at this point you should end up with something like the following:

Under the parameters rollout of the vray gizmo, start adjusting the parameters. The “length” is (obviously) for specifying the lengths of the threads in your carpet. In this case I have set it to 4.5 cm, the thickness to about 0.1 cm and left the others as default.
Looking at the test rendering above, it is obvious that you need more threads. You can do this by scrolling down to “Distribution” and increase the parameter right next to “Per Area”.
NOTE: By default this is set to per area, which means that the distribution of the threads will affect the entire area of the object selected, while the “per face” will distribute threads on each face of the object.

After setting the per area distribution to 1.2 I ended up with the following result:

It’s starting to look ok, but at this point it is too uniform and definitely needs some variation.
This can be easily arranged by tweaking the parameters under the variation rollout of the vray fur. All the parameters have very intuitive names so you can understand easily what they do (direction var, length var, thickness var, gravity var)

After having set the direction var to 0.8, length to 0.5, thickness var to 0.7, and gravity var to 0.7, I ended up with the following rendering.

CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO VIEW A HIGHER RESOLUTION RENDERING
Following the same method you can create grass, animal fur or other similar stuff, but again keep in mind that this will take a lot of rendering time.

1) Aligning the cad files.
The first step that you need to make in order to model a building following the cad files provided by the architect is to correctly align the plans and the elevations in the viewport, like in the following image (for easier manipulation you need to group the imported cad files and name the groups accordingly “ground floor plan”, “front elevation”, “back elevation”, etc.):

We will start modeling the ground floor, so after aligning the plans you need to hide the upper floor plan.

2) Creating the walls
Create a box with the width equal to the thickness of the wall, convert it to editable poly and place it like in the picture bellow.

Adjust the height of the geometry by pulling up the vertices in order to match the height of the ground floor like in the following screen capture.

Extrude one of the sides, following the ground floor autocad plan. When extruding keep the delimitations of the windows or doors (like in the image bellow). This will save you a lot of time later.

When you have finished extruding all around the perimeter of the ground floor, delete the 2 polygons (in the corner, where the last wall created meets the first one) and weld the vertices like in the image below:

*in case you were wondering why you have to delete the 2 polygons the answer is simple: to avoid coplanar faces that may cause artifacts later when rendering.

3) Creating the windows and doors
Many will be tempted to use Booleans at this point, especially the ones that have a lot of autocad background. However, I try never to use them, since they mess up the geometry, which not only makes it difficult to edit it later if needed, but also it may result in artifacts when rendering.
So here’s the way I do it:

Select the polygons that will become the windows and use quick slice tool, to cut them according to their height dimension in the elevations.
Now delete the polygons that are facing the interior of the wall, and extrude the opposite ones towards the inside; in the “extrusion height” type “-“ and enter the amount equal to the thickness of the wall.

After the extrusion, detach the already selected polygons and drag them forward until they match the window frames represented in the ground floor autocad plan (top view).
This will become the geometry for the window frames, so you can assign them a name and a material.

In the front view, use the quick slice tool, to “draw” the shape of the frames (you can also do this using “inset” if it suits you better). In my case I have a double frame window, but in order to keep the explanation as simple as possible, I will ignore that for the moment and assume that it is a single frame.
Therefore, after having selected the middle polygon, detach it (this one will become the glass).

Now apply a shell modifier to the window frame and give it the desired thickness.
If you have a double framed window, repeat this step with the detached polygon.
You should end up with something like this:

Following the same principles, you can continue modeling the rest of the windows and doors of the ground floor.
TIP: When working on one elevation of the building make sure you select the polygons that you will work with, before using the “quick” slice tool. Otherwise you will end up cutting the geometry behind as well, and you risk messing up the geometry.

4) Modeling the upper floor
Hide the ground floor plan and unhide the upper floor. Select the top polygons like in the image below, and extrude them according to the height in the elevation.

After having extruded the walls for the upper floor, it is best to hide the polygons of the ground floor.

If the upper floor perimeter is the same as ground floor than you are lucky. As you can see from the viewport grab, I’m not that lucky since it’s slightly different in the left corner.
In this case, the first thing that needs to be done is to delete the polygons that create the “diagonal wall”

Now select the edges from the left, hold “shift” and drag them along the “y” axis, following the cad file of the upper floor up to the corner.

After having done that repeat the operation, but this time on the “x” axis, until the edges meet with the ones from the other wall. Adjust the vertexes position until the vertices from one wall are placed exactly over the corresponded ones from the other wall, and weld them.

If the upper floor is considerably different than the ground floor, this could take a lot of time, so it would be better if you model it separately following the same methods.

5) Modeling the details of the roof
Extrude the polygons from the border of the roof in order to match the details in the elevations.
Create the roof border by selecting all the polygons of the roof walls, detach them as clone and apply a shell modifier to the object.
Convert the newly created object to editable poly and adjust the width by dragging the vertices along the x and y axis so they match the dimensions indicated in the cad drawings.

Now it’s time to create the windows and doors following the same methods that you used at the ground floor.
Finally we model the balconies and the steps separately.
In the front view create a box and place it over the balcony. Adjust its dimensions until it matches perfectly the balcony in the elevation.

In the top view adjust again the vertices until they match the position of the balcony from this view as well. Now use the quick slice tool to “cut” the shape of the handrail and the flower stands.

After having selected the needed polygons, extrude them to the desired height.

The workflow for creating the stairs is very similar. Start with a box, convert it to editable poly and use extrude, quick slice and drag the vertices until everything matches in the top view and the side elevations.
The handrails of the stairs are created with editable splines, with the desired thickness.

That’s about it. If you have any questions feel free to ask by posting a comment.

Here is the max file with the cad files aligned.

1) Create a spline that will be the central axis of your hedge. Now clone it and hide the resulting copy (we will use that later).

2) Give it a rectangular thickness and write the desired dimensions of your hedge. In this case 40 cm wide and 70 cm length (this one is the actual height). After having done that convert your spline to an editable poly.

3) Create a leaf from a plane and assign a material with a leaf texture to it.
*you may probably wonder why I haven’t used a simple plane with opacity map… actually I have found out on that if you use vray it is less hardware consuming if you use geometry converted to vray proxy rather than planes with opacity maps. If you want to use opacity maps, feel free to do so, and continue with the tutorial.

Now the fun begins…
4) Create a particle array (under “create”, “particle systems”).

5) Under “object based emitter” click “pick object” and select the converted spline.

6) Under “particle generation” be sure to set the following parameters:
-speed – “0”
-emit start – “-100”
-emit stop – “0”

7) Under “particle type” check “instanced geometry”, than scroll down to “instancing parameters” click “pick object” and select the leaf geometry that you made.

9) Under “rotation and collisions”, “spin speed controls”, set the phase to 90 degrees.

10) Scroll up to “particle quantity”, and set use rate to “1500”. This parameter actually sets the number of leafs that your hedge will have. Therefore, it would be wise to keep viewport display as “ticks” and not “mesh” and the percent of displayed particles at 10%.

11)Now is the time to do some test renderings to help you decide upon the number of leafs needed.  Bellow is a result that I’m happy with.

However, as you can see, there are some large gaps between the leafs; I wouldn’t want to increase their number because it would make the scene much to heavy, and it won’t even look real… so here is what we do:

12) Model a few branches using simple box modeling techniques, like in the image bellow:

13) Unhide the clone of the spline that you’ve made at the beginning at the tutorial, and use the spacing tool to clone the branches along that (tools => spacing tool)
If you don’t need a close-up of the hedge in your rendering you can actually skip this step, since the branches won’t be visible from distance.

The only thing that needs to be done is to convert all this to vray proxy (that is if you’re using vray; if not, than you’ve finished the tutorial).
As you can see, you can not convert the “parray” to editable mesh/poly. Fortunately, there is a way to do this, but before you need to change the “percent display” from 10% to 100% in the basic parameters rollout of the pArray. (Be careful, because this may cause the software to crash, due to high memory consumtion)
You can do this with the “mesher”; go to “create”, “compound”, “mesher”. After having created it, go to “pick object” and select the pArray.
Now convert it to editable poly, attach the branches, than do the vraymesh export to create the vray proxy.
That’s it!

If you have any problems, post a comment and I will be glad to help.

Modeling 3D hedges like this is a lot of fun if you have enough harware power… otherwise it can become frustrating due to frequent crashes and slow viewport navigation. Therefore, if you are not doing an animation and the camera position of your still rendering permits it, I recommend faking 3d hedges in renderings using photoshop.