Hello everyone! My name is Ricardo Canton; I live in São Paulo and graduated in architecture in 2004. Since then, I have been collaborating with several architecture studios in the 3D visualization of their projects. I received an invitation from 3DTotal to share a bit of my 3D techniques and skills with the community, through the Making Of my image of the Cais das Artes (Quay of Arts).

This image was produced a little bit before construction began on the Cais das Artes museum and served as an illustrative support during the presentation of the project in lectures and publications in architecture magazines.

Before starting the tutorial, I will briefly explain what the Cais das Artes project was. The building was designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Metro Arquitetos Associados, and comprised of a museum and a theater equipped to host large scale art events. Located on the Suá Bay, near the island of Vitória in Brazil, the main brief behind the project was that it should reflect the value of the landscape and historical surroundings of the city, and complement it. The design included platforms that allowed people to appreciate the beauty of their natural surroundings and the new square was intended to become a cultural attraction for the city.

In this project I used the following tools: AutoCAD for modeling, 3ds Max and V-Ray for texturing and illumination and Photoshop for post-production of the image.

Modeling

Given that AutoCAD is still the most common architectural software used by my clients, and because it contains all the design models and perfectly fits my needs, I still consider AutoCAD the main tool for modeling. Only when projects are more complex, will I combine the AutoCAD process with 3ds Max. In this specific project simple commands were used, such as Extrude, Polyline, Box, Union, Subtract and Slice. Fig.01 – 03 show the main stages and construction components of the building.




After finishing the modeling phase, the DWG archive was imported into 3ds Max. After that I adjusted the internal units of the 3ds Max to meters.

Lighting and Camera Setup

The next step was to configure the lighting of the scene. To simulate the skylight, a hemisphere was used in which a VRaylight material, with a JPEG texture of a sky, was applied (Fig.04).