Texturing

If modeling was quite easy, texturing was not much harder. As always, I used V-Ray materials for every object in the scene, with their bump and specular. And in most cases, I used the free plugin Color Correct (http://www.cuneytozdas.com/software/3dsmax), to alter some properties of a texture (brightness, contrast, saturation, gamma, RGB levels… etc), without externally modifying the bitmap itself. I looked for several types of concrete to be used in the lowest part of the image. Some of them, like the wall, with roughness and other ones, like the floor, with a polished finish and some imperfections. In other objects like the columns, I used the standard 3ds Max displacement to give that aspect of rough edges (Fig.06 – 07).



I had to unwrap just a couple of objects in the scene: the horizontal concrete plaques on top of the columns, and the exterior wall, in order to paint the humidity stains. Quite easy objects to unwrap, aren't they? The rest of the objects have standard mapping coordinates (box or cylindrical) (Fig.08).

Lighting - Render

It was in the lighting where I had to put all my effort to get a similar result to the original photograph. And even more, using V-Ray renderer, instead of an unbiased one, like Maxwell or Fry. I wanted to achieve that result by hand, not just by giving the coordinates, date and hour to the renderer. I must say I didn't get a 100% exact copy of the photograph, but I got close enough to it and I learned enough to consider it finished, too.

I used VRaySun, VRaySky and a VRayPhysical Camera. I hadn't used this method on an interior scene before, and so I had to do a lot of tests to achieve the right intensity of light and the right atmosphere. I also had to move the Sun in order to get the shadows exactly where I wanted. Apart from the VRaySun, I also used some VRayLight as portals on the right. When you use a light as a portal, you can't manually control the intensity and color of the light. In fact, it's not a normal light any more. It gets the intensity and color of the environment (VRaySky in this case), and "pushes” it inside our scene.

And, as always when you use a VRayPhysical Camera, I had to keep in mind that all the light's multipliers shown depend on the settings of the camera (Fig.09 – 11).





On this occasion, I rendered several channels: Diffuse, ZDepth (which I finally didn't use), some volumetrics of the main light, and an Ambient Occlusion pass (AO) (Fig.12 – 15).