Materials & Lighting

This part was a no-brainer. I decided to go with a simple consistent material for the whole scene and do the rest in Photoshop. This is a procedure I've tried before that worked out quite well with one of my previous images called The Gateway. I then used Maxwell's physical sky and sun set at mid-day as the only light source and let it cook overnight (Fig.08).

Post-production

Once in Photoshop I started out by doing a few initial color corrections then applied a few textures to add a little bit more detail, mainly to the plating of the base. With the help of an alpha mask, I also added the sky which could be seen in the small gaps at the top. Then I used a copper texture for the areas next to the fans on the outer walls. Although I wanted the image to be slightly monochromatic, I also wanted to add a little bit of color in certain areas; not much, but just enough to break the uniform look. Once that was done it was time to add some dirt to the scene. For this purpose I used black and white dirt maps and various layer effects, applying these at the edges, cracks and larger clean surfaces etc. I also made a few imaginary billboard textures for the blank modeled ones in the scene (Fig.09 – 11).





The next step was to add a little warmth to the overall atmosphere, so I decided to add a few sun rays coming through the opening at the top. For these I used the Line tool to create a few thick lines, added a fairly large amount of Gaussian blur to them and decreased their opacity slightly. I then used a layer mask and the Gradient tool to shape the rays. I also used the Ellipse tool in a similar way to create a little bit of haze where the rays come through the support beams. To wrap things up I did a few more color and gamma corrections before I baked all the layers and finalized the image (Fig.12).