Introduction
Hello everyone! I am Sebastien Czaja, and for the last five years, I have been working as an illustrator in architecture in France.
Briefly, this image was created for my personal amusement, for an interview. It was such a real pleasure for me to create it that I wanted to go as far as possible with the finish. You are going to see in this Making Of article that I used simple and classical methods in order to reach my aim. Actually, I prefer using 3D software like 3ds Max and painting software Photoshop as strong tools, rather than a direct route to a final piece.
References
First I have to honour the amazing artist that is Nicolas Bouvier, aka Sparth, because without his artistic concepts I would have never been able to create this image. His work is a continuous inspiration for me due to the variety of the themes, style and composition etc. Take a look at his site if you don't know him already: www.sparth.com.
I was inspired by one of Sparth's concepts, Acres (Fig.01 – This image is the property of Ubisoft) and decided to try and make an architectural project with dirty and old walls – the opposite of classical architecture.
Fig. 01
I started by searching the internet (Fig.02) for realistic references of the town of Acres to help me with the modeling because, as you can see, the concept presented lots of abstract areas for me to interpret. I think having good references allows you to have a good base for any kind of work.
Fig. 02
Modeling
I used 3ds Max for modeling (Fig.03). I used poly editing tools such as Extrude, Bevel and Cut, and started with very simple shapes, using boxes for houses and splines for the rounder shapes.
Mapping
I did not use a UVW developer (no unwrapping) for this image (Fig.04). I only used UVWs in box, plan.
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