Hello and welcome to this Tutorial. I wish to share with you some thoughts on Texturing and PostProduction. The original model I am working from here, was made by Marko Dabrovic of RNA Studio.


Once I had decided on lighting and placement of the camera, I began browsing 3DTotal's Total Textures CD's. I quickly found and picked out a number of fitting maps for the cathedral.


For the window frames, I chose a rusted type of metal (METAL 04).
For the walls, I decided to select a yellowish Brick texture (BRICK 02). The pillars were decorated with another Brick Map (BRICK 01). Luckily all Textures on the CD's come with perfect Bump Maps and are 100% seamless.




Once I had all Maps slotted into the Materials, I assigned them to the objects in the scene.
I had to do some tweaking on the UVW Maps. Then I addeed inall neccessary lights and hit "render". That's when I found a little problem with the textures on the pillars. There are nasty little cracks in them, as you can see. It would have been rather unconvinient to solve this in MAX by adjusting the UVW-coordinates. So I decided to correct this during the process of PostProduction.

I rendered the scene again, this time at the final resolution of 2400x1800 pixels. This took about 15 minutes on a Pentium4 2Ghz with 512MB RAM. I saved the result and opened the image file in Photoshop.

The first step of PostProduction was actually getting rid of these cracks. I did so using Photoshop's Stamp tool. Copying and pasting groups of pixels over the cracks, I covered them up. And the best thing is that no one will ever know. Well, you do!

What I did next was darkening some areas and adding some contrast. This was followed by a "Sharpen Mask"-Filter.


Finally I selected an area of the image, created a new layer and in this layer painted a gradient from white to transparent. Then I reduced the layer's opacity and blurred the gradient up a bit. This is an easy and efficient way of painting volume light. That's it!


This image shows a second version of the cathedral. Here the structure is textured in warmer colours.
 
I think that the quality of my work will increase using the Total Textures and they will be of much help in the future. Big thanks to 3D Total!