Breeze Of The Past Making of

Tue, 07/20/2010 - 10:58 — Isk

In this tutorial of my latest work, the 'Breeze of the Past', I will discuss all the stages of the project. I wanted to make the work look simple with nice details, focusing on the contents of the work, with nice atmosphere and mood. I would like to thank CGSociety and Ballistic for giving me the chance to present my latest work in the EXPOSÉ 8 book as Master in the Interior Architecture category.

The work consists of an actual old office room in good condition, still in use even now. I started this work wanting to create a silent story, so I made the components of the room appear to be speaking for themselves; each piece tells you a story and is reminiscent of memories.

Before starting the modeling I searched for suitable pictures which would help with the modeling on the project. I searched for these pictures in web search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Flickr.

To look at the project; we might find that the modeling seems to be quite involved and there may be a feeling that the project is difficult but in fact it is not.

Inside 3ds Max, I used editable splines and editable polys to convert this blueprint into a 3D model of the bookcase. I also completed the other furniture in the same way.

The project is very simple in the shape and content, for me modeling is really something very relaxing and nothing special, all the modeling was made by using the editable Spline and editable Poly.

I started by modeling the project environment: an office room. I wasn?t particularly interested in the details of the environment. I was going to focus more on the details that were inside the room and were central to the project.

Once the room was complete, the next step was to fill it with some furniture starting with a bookcase. Before I started modeling the bookcase, I searched for some more reference images for bookcases that would be suitable for the scene and could contain a large number of books and I ended up with this blueprint.

For the ornaments in the scene – like the details on the desk – I used a very simple method. I know there are many different ways to create ornaments like this, but in my opinion, my method is a good way of getting the shape I want without getting bored with the project.

The detail on the desk is a group of repeated tree leaves. I began with one leaf and then multiplied it to form an identical group and built up the design from there

As for the other details in the scene, I did these in separate files and then imported them into the project.

Here are some of the materials I used in this project.

I used the UVW mapping technique; I'm always using pretty basic projection of textures like planer, box or cylindrical mapping at everywhere. The textures I used in this project included maps within 3ds Max and some textures from CGTextures.com

And all the materials I used were blend materials with V-Ray materials. Most of the project was done by using only one mask and that was a picture of an old book cover which I used in most of my materials and at some of the other stages to give the sense of the room being old.
Texturing the books was somewhat different because they were all different sizes. So I went back to the book pictures I?d gathered for the project and then textured one book. Then by changing the size of each book and the textures, I was able to create the full library.

For lighting this scene, I've used one V-Ray light, one Target Direct light as sun with V-Ray shadows and HDRI Image.
The settings for these lights can be seen here. For rendering, I used V-Ray and because of the many details present in the image, I chose the simplest type of rendering. Rendering took about 19 hours at 5000x3750 pixels resolution. I think that time is pretty good for me. The settings for these lights can be seen here.

Post-production is the most important stage of any work and indeed in this case, the simplest. The target of this stage is to add atmosphere and mood to the scene.

I make the fog image by removing all the lights apart from the Target Direct light. I selected Shadow Map for the type of Shadow, with the addition of Volume Light Effect.

I also made sure I?d turned off the
V-Ray environment and then selected all the models, giving them a V-Ray material with a black color, and repeated the rendering again and here the rendering took about half hour at the same resolution.

I composited the image inside Photoshop. Firstly I merged the fog picture with the original picture by changing the layers to Screen and setting Opacity to 60%. I also corrected the colors and added some simple effects by using Photoshop brushes and the pretty plug-in 'Color Efex Pro 3.0' to add atmosphere and mood to the scene.

Source :- cgsociety.org

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