Software Used:

3ds Max, V-Ray, Photoshop and Fusion

Hi everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here with this Making Of, in which I’ve tried to explain the creation process of my latest image “Never Again”. As usual, I used 3ds Max with V-Ray for rendering, Adobe Photoshop to create and manipulate textures, and Fusion for the final post-production.

Inspiration - References:

As I always say, I use my personal projects as a way to experiment and learn new methods, practice techniques I still don’t fully understand or improve my skills. In this case, the goal was to recreate a photograph I took five years ago, with a 1-megapixel digital camera (not much quality, as you guess), in a place I’ve only been to once. This place had something that inspired me, and the photograph had lighting I really liked. Unfortunately, the project spent some years in my “work in progress” folder. But some weeks ago, I finally decided to do it. As a reference, I only had the one photograph. When I took it, I didn’t know I was going to recreate it in 3D (if I had known, I would have taken 200 photographs, to have everything in detail). And moreover, with that forced perspective, it was rather difficult to guess the sizes, distances and so on.

Modeling:

There’s really not much to say about modeling, because everything was extremely easy. Most parts of the scene are beveled and modified boxes, cylinders and other easy objects. So the main difficulties with the modeling were the details, such as small cracks in the walls (Fig.01 – 02).

Fig.01

Fig.02

Some other details I put emphasis on were the dry leaves on the outside, blown by the wind and piled up next to the glass. As you can see, there are two types of leaves. I started using the strange-shaped yellow one, which is from a commercial library. But I was not happy enough with the result, so I decided to model my own leaves, and use both of them. To do so, I modeled just one leaf, and once it was textured, I used a free script, called “Advanced Painter” (http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/advanced-painter), and more precisely, a 64bit version of it (http://3dcenter.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=82821) (Fig.03).

Fig.03

One of the functions of this script is to make instances of an object, and scatter it all over another one, just as if you were “painting” with the mouse on top of it. That’s how I instanced two hundred leaves or so. After that, I used another script to give some randomness, changing the size and rotation of every individual leaf, so they didn’t look exactly the same. That script is RandomTransform, and it comes with Blur Beta Tools free pack. I used an old version, but it has been recently updated (now for XSI, too) (http://www.blur.com/blurbeta.html) (Fig.04).

Fig.04

And finally another detail would be the ivy you can see in the background, on top of the wall. On another previous project, I had used Ivy Generator by Thomas Luft, which is a standalone application. You have to export your scene to *.obj, open it inside Ivy Generator, generate the ivy, save it as *.obj and then import it from your program of choice. But this time I wanted to test an alternative (and faster) way. A 3ds Max plugin, based on the Ivy Generator, called: gw::Ivy (http://www.guruware.at).   Alter a few clicks and some tests I managed to grow this ivy. It was not exactly what I was looking for, but considering it was the first time I had used the plugin, I was quite satisfied with the result (Fig.05).

Fig.05

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Related Tutorials

If you liked reading this tutorial, you may also be interested in the following. "Making of Le Bain" by Eve Berthelette I started ‘’Le Bain’’ in 2007; the idea was to do something architectural and oriental. After some sketches, it became a bathhouse. Unfortunately, I had to put this project aside due to lack of time, which resulted in a lack of motivation as well... But recently (this last January 2010) I happened to have lots of free time… and still had this unachieved project, so I gave it a new try – it took literally a month of work, and here it is at last! "Making of Classic Living Room" - Using 3DTotal Textures by Roger Vila Castane This is my first Making Of and I’m going to try to briefly explain the process of creating my image Classic Living Room. I used 3ds Max for the main development of the image and VRay as the renderer. I also used Adobe Photoshop for creating the textures and adding the final touches at the end.

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