Making of 'The Quiet Room'

Introduction

Hi everyone, in this "making of" article I am going to show the general process that I went through to create the "Quiet Room". I used Autodesk Maya to model all of the objects, and used Photoshop to do the texturing work. "Quiet Room" is one of my recent personal works; I love scary movies, so I think it would be interesting to create an empty, creepy, little room.

Before I start any project, I collect as much reference material as possible from the Internet, and look at photographs, movies and games as well, as it can all help to give me the inspiration I need for what I want to do. Below are just a few of the reference pictures related to this project (Fig.01).

Fig. 2_reference

Fig. 2_reference

Modeling

Looking at reference pictures is very important for modelling, because you can really see the scale and proportion of each object and how they relate to one another. Many objects in the scene are started from a cube or a cylinder; I like to start with a simple form and keep adding details to make it the way I want. After all the modelling work is complete we can then lay out all the UVs to render an ambient occlusion map, and then we can start texturing.

Here are the grey and the wire frame renders (Fig.02 - 03):

Fig. 3_modeling

Fig. 3_modeling

Fig. 4_greyandwire

Fig. 4_greyandwire

Texturing

I usually like to look at the reference photographs to find some interesting patterns and details that make sense for each object (like the quilt for the bed cover), and then I begin texturing with these details. I am going to talk now about how I textured one of the objects in the scene: the rusted chest. Here are all the various textures that I used for the chest (Fig.04):

Fig. 5_texture

Fig. 5_texture

In the following image is the process of how I overlaid the textures together (Fig.05).

Fig. 6_rusted_chest

Fig. 6_rusted_chest

  • I pick two different textures for my base and erase some parts from one of the textures, so that the texture will look blended with the other.
  • At this point I find some little details from other photographs and apply them to the texture.
  • In this step, I layer the third texture and change the blending mode to "Soft Light", to help to mix the textures together and to achieve more of a natural look.
  • On the fourth layer of the texture, I erased part of it and didn't change any overlay settings. Leaving the blending mode as "Normal" is nice so that you can see some parts of the texture are not mixed in with others. It will also help to show the thickness of the texture.
  • Multiple more textures are layered on top of everything for specific detail, whilst erasing little parts of it. This is important to break up the tone of all the textures, and creates the different values in different areas.
  • In the final stage, simply multiply an AO map on top of all textures to help set the object down in the scene.

Here is the dresser texture page; it is basically using the same method as how I textured the chest (Fig.06).

Fig. 7_dresser

Fig. 7_dresser

Here are some texture pages and normal maps of other objects in the scene (Fig.07).

Fig. 8_normal_maps

Fig. 8_normal_maps

Rendering & Lighting

For this scene, I tried to achieve daytime lighting. So first of all, I created one Spot light outside the room for the light source coming in through the window. Then I created a few ambient lights and placed them around the room to create little pockets of colour. I changed the colour and the shadow of the light because this helped to create the mood. I wanted to achieve a cold, creepy feeling in the room, so I turned the colour of all lights to green and blue. Focus on creating the mood mainly here, as this is a really important part of the whole scene. The mood will tie the whole scene together. Finally, you can render with Mental Ray with Final Gathering turned 'On' (Fig.08).



Fig. 9_Room_Day

Fig. 9_Room_Day

 

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