Hello, my name is Omar Fernandes and I'm from Lisbon, Portugal. In this article I will try to explain the process of the creation of my image, "Alfama”, which is part of my Vancouver Film School demo reel.

I decided to make this image/movie because I wanted to show some of the beautiful places in Portugal. Although this place is located in the stunning neighbourhood of Alfama, Lisbon, I decided to go with this old alley to show – and improve – my texturing skills.

After searching the Internet for references, I asked my friends to take some pictures of the alley so that I could have a good starting point for reference. No matter what the objective of your work is, the more references you have the better (Fig.01).


The second step was to create a good proxy. In order to obtain the height and depth of each building, I began to match some of my photo references (Fig.02). As you can see, matching the perspective of my camera with the one in the photo was relatively quick, though for my project it was not necessarily as important for what I wanted to accomplish in the end.


Next, I started by modelling the props in the scene and texturing some of the metals, doors and windows. The process was always the same: model, unwrap and texture each object (Fig.03 – 04). As you can see, most of the scene is very low poly.





Here are some of the props and windows I made for the scene (Fig.05), always using the same methodology – first model, then unwrap and then texture. At this point I wasn't too worried about tweaking the shaders as my scene didn't yet have a final lighting setup. I only roughed in an Omni, a directional light which gave me an idea of how the textures would hold up.


For the archway I decided to experiment with a different approach. Basically, I lofted a curve and then created a texture of 512 x 4064 pixels. Then I used the UVW xform modifier to apply the UVs to the loft. Afterwards, I converted to poly and added destruction to it using the cut tool (Fig.06).