Making Of 'Wal-Mart 2161'

Hello, my name is Brano Florian and I would like to show you the approach I have used to create my picture Wallmart 2161. It was partially a commercial project based on a design, but the rest was in my hands. So let's see the process.

Modeling & Mapping of the Truck

For the modeling I used standard poly modeling in 3ds Max 2009 with the Polyboost plugin (Fig.01a - b).

Fig. 01a

Fig. 01a

Fig. 01b

Fig. 01b

From the beginning I was careful to remember to use automatic mapping on splines where there was no need to deal with UVs later. On the other parts I used a simple UVW map modifier and tiled texture setup with UV Gizmo. The cabin was mapped in UV Layout, which I can recommend for this sort of "half-organic" object. The back side of the model was made quite detailed in case I wanted to animate the scene in the future (Fig.02).

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Texturing

For the model I made four main textures in Photoshop (Fig.03a - b). I did this mainly by combining photos. Rust was added with random brush strokes or taken from other photos. The textures were converted to JPEGs and then a Sharpen filter was applied.

The gun was mapped using automatic unwrap in 3ds Max, then exported into Bodypaint for color and to add the scratched edges.

Fig. 03a

Fig. 03a

Fig. 03b

Fig. 03b

Materials

The materials are nothing special. The Bump and Specular maps were edited PSD files. This is a relatively quick process. Individual bitmaps are assigned to slots in V-RayMtl. The only values that I set were the Reflection values in the basic parameters.

Terrain

The terrain is divided into three parts. The furthest part is a large plane with a Displace modifier. Inside is a Cellular map masked by a radial gradient. After I collapsed these layers I rotated and adjusted the scaling to make the ground look good from the camera view. The part out of view was hidden by a Poly modifier (Fig.04). The material is a simple mixture of two different tiled textures of sand masked by a procedural Noise map. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about; this technique is well covered in other Making Ofs on www.3dtotal.com.

The middle part of the terrain is just a dense plane with a Noise modifier in place to emphasize the varying surface.

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

The Road

The road is closest to the camera so it had to look good. I didn't want to waste much time here testing Displacements so I made it as simple as I could. I mapped onto a plane an edited photo of a road and exported it to Mudbox. I then sculpted the cracks and varying levels. Then I imported it back into 3ds Max with the highest level of tesselating. The last thing to do before the road was complete was to set some Noise.

Objects in the Environment

I modeled five blades of grass. Each one was slightly different in size and direction of bending. I copied them into a clump of grass with the Advanced Painter. The painter took care of rotation and random size as well. I then applied a noise modifier and FFD for the final shape adjustments. The material is a multi-sub material type with four standard materials. Every one has a slightly different yellow-green gradient in the Diffuse slot. To assign an ID I used the script "randomElementsMatIDs" by Andrei Kletskov. The rocks were generated by the script "RockGenerator" by Alessandro Ardolino and the material is the same for the terrain (Fig.05).

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

The objects that I needed to place precisely were placed using Advanced Painter. The other items were placed via a particle system (Neil Blevins made a great tutorial about this).

Render

The render was done using VRaySun, VRayDome and VRayPhysCam in V-Ray 1.5. You can see the settings in Fig.06. I didn't use any advanced lighting. I had a little problem here with overburns in some places, so I rendered the car with and without VRaySun and then combined them later in post-production. I rendered out the AO, Z-Depth, grass and, of course, the main scene (Fig.07a - d).

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

Fig 05

Fig 05

Fig. 07a

Fig 06

Fig 06

Fig. 07b

Fig 07

Fig 07

Fig. 07c

Fig 08

Fig 08

Fig. 07d

Post-production

All the layers were composed in Photoshop. To find a suitable sky was more difficult than I had thought. I found one from cgtextures that was fine after some editing. The saturation moderately decreased in distance to add some depth and I also adjusted this in the Depth pass.

The swirling dust in the background was made with a simple cloud brush (found it on the internet).



I then did some basic color corrections, editing of curves, and added some blur to fake depth of field (Fig.08a - b).

Fig. 08a

Fig. 08a

Fig. 08b

Fig. 08b

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