In this, my first "Making Of”, I'm gonna try to explain the creation process of my image "Dungeon”. I used mainly 3ds Max, with V-Ray for the renderer. I also used Adobe Photoshop for the textures and small retouches, and Fusion for the final post-production.

Inspiration

First of all, I must say that I used this project as a way to challenge my own capabilities. As artists there are always techniques we don't know or try, due to lack of time or interest, or just because we don't need them for the daily job. So I approached this project as an experiment where I could try to learn and get used to those techniques and tools, which are very useful.

The story of the image starts like this: as a freelancer, I work at home. And my family and friends call my office "The Cave” or "The Dungeon”. So the idea came from that. I tried to mix both concepts: a cool office with some details of a dungeon or a jail. No matter how cool our office is, or how much we love our work, all of us feel chained to it sometimes. All of us have our own prisoner ball (mine are some ugly buildings & 3D sections I have to do at work).

References

I started taking some pictures of my real office furniture, and some other objects I have in my office (computer case, books, magazines, cork panel, electronic stuff etc.). I also put several details or "cameos” in the scene (private jokes or messages to my friends – they know who they are!). This is something I always like to do if possible (Fig.01).


The room itself was totally made up in my head, half inspired by the typical US residential basement, and half by a render by Aaron Coon, which I really liked (Fig.02).

Modeling

Most parts of the scene were not difficult at all to model, since there were a lot of quite easy objects (boxes converted to Edit Poly and then manipulated; splines with thickness or extruded etc). This is clearly visible on the incense burner. As you can see, it's just a lathed spline, and then I used boolean operations to make the star-shaped holes. There are also several objects I modeled without much detail, like the router, to save polygons, since I knew they were not going to be too visible in the final render (Fig.03 – 06).