Making Of Interior: 'Hallway'

Introduction

This project is a Making Of an original scene which has been re-textured with the 3DTotal Textures Collections.

There were two challenges for this picture: the first of which was to create an interior design scene, keeping a focus on a specific part of a living room. My inspiration came from a design study by Steve Nuss Ltd. Interior Design & Antiques (http://www.stevenussltd.com), and the main objective for this project was to work on realistic lighting, without too much 2D post-work. The second challenge was to make the picture in the spirit of "speed modelling" - not too much time for the modelling/lighting/texturing pass and optimise the V-Ray render engine and render time. So the objective here was to basically obtain a great scene in the least time as possible!

Modelling

For the modelling part there are no surprises here; with 3d Studio Max I used basic techniques - box modelling, poly modelling or spline/lathe - according to objects I was creating. With photo references, modelling was quick! In just one day, all of the main elements were modelled (Fig.01). When all the final objects are in the scene, it's a good base to start the lighting work!

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Tip: When I work on the modelling pass, I'm used to isolating materials and giving objects different colours with standard shaders (Fig.02). This way, visually, it's better to understand the future materials to apply, and it's also a benefit in terms of the time it takes for the texturing pass, too - if you have too many objects in scene then you don't have to select them all one by one, as it's already been done with the selection of the materials!

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Lighting

The main idea for the lighting in this scene was a strong side light, which allowed me to obtain a horizontal gradient light for the natural light. For aesthetic purposes, lightning in the centre of the scene helped to achieve a kind of intimate feeling (Fig.03). The Left Vraylight was used for the main light - slightly oversaturated to burn a few objects and to create some contrast. The right Vraylight was used as a kind of "back light" to increase the contrast without losing another source of lighting (like from a corridor or another room). The 2 Omni lights (3ds Max) were used for the artificial lighting to create some soft shadows in the centre (don't forget to use Photoshop to turn the lamps on!).

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

With the lights all set up, it was time to make my first render of the project, with a simple override material in V-Ray (Fig.04).

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Texturing

For the texturing, I use the following DVDs from 3DTotal's Total Textures collections:

TTV1:R2 - General Textures
TTV3:R2 - Bases & Layers
TTV6: R2 - Clean Textures
TTV9:R2 - Ancient Tribes & Civilisations
TTV16 - Architectural & Showroom

I'm used to doing some mixing work in Photoshop to create my own textures with some photo references or texture collections - this way I can give depth to the materials. For this scene, I've taken as an example the making of the old wooden table. I used some wood references from the Total Textures with different kinds of grains and layered them to obtain an old, worn look to the wooden texture (Fig.05) for my table. Texturing work is always important part for me - it achieves the realism and depth of emotion in an image!

Fig. 05 - Click to Enlarge

Fig. 05 - Click to Enlarge

The second part of the texturing process was the UVWmap, for the scale. It's important to be extremely careful with this part, because an object with false mapping can give the scale of your scene away! (Fig.06)

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

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Rendering

As my render engine, I used V-Ray 1.50 for 3D Studio Max. V-Ray is, for me, double-sided software. On the one hand, it is absolutely greedy in terms of your hardware resources! But on the other hand, it can be optimised and create great renders in short amounts of time - providing you understand the settings! One picture can speak better than a thousand words, so here are the settings I use for this image (Fig.07).

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

And here is the first final render for this project (Fig.08). For a picture of 1500x1312 pixels, the render time was 42 minutes.

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Conclusion

After some colour correction and tweaking in Photoshop, the image was complete. The entire project took me 3-4 days in my spare time to create. It was interesting in terms of the execution for the lighting and I've now got a great render setting for an interior which doesn't require too much time, and there was no need for any large amounts of post work, just some usual corrections!

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