The Fleur de Lis wasn't so difficult at all, Photoshop has the shape on it's default library, just access them at


Rasterize the shape and then blend it to the concrete texture below


When settting up UVs for highly detailed things, Sometimes is necessary adopting different strategies. If it's a flat color, no UV is needed at all, in this case, I wanted a concrete/stone look (UV requiered), but if I Unwrapped each human figure as I would if it's highres, I would have much more time spent and probably would not reach the deadline at safe time. A good solution I 've found is collapsing a good couple of human figure on the umbral, and then applying a single UV mapping to them all and then repeating the process until every single one is grouped, collapsed and mapped. For the walls a planar mapping will be fine (exept the holes dettached and maped individually.

Lighting

I used a single sky light with lightracer with the following customization parameter:

On the side viewport you can see the scene setup


Now the configuration of Lightracer


you can click 9 or go to menu Rendering> Advanced Lighting.
Important parameters to change:
Bounces values determines the bouncing values of the photon before they die, higher value, more bounce and more light (and higher rendering values).
the Color Bleed, will define the reflection of the object light

The adaptive Undersampling has to do with the final quality of the image, you can see more clearly when rendering GI for flat-color-object and you can see the flick when using higher Initial Sample Spacing. The rule is: For better quality and less flick, use lower initial sample spacing (like 4x4 or 1x1) with subdivide down to 1x1 however it will increase a lot the rendering time, you can balance these values and define which one fits better your needs.

note: You can check out my tutorial on Introduction to Lightracer on 3DCafe directly by clicking here.

Post work

After the imaged is rendered I added some brightness/contrast adjustment and a bit of color balance to Cyan and a bit of blue. I really recommend some post work to improve the lightracer render

The final result is:


hope you find this project overview useful
cheers

Mario Russo - 2004