Introduction

Hello, my name is Moises Gomes and I live in São Paulo city in Brazil. In this Making Of I will show you the production process behind the creation of the Military Truck image. This piece was developed for the portfolio of a games company here in Brazil, where I am responsible for every part of inorganic modeling and texturing.

I will cover the following areas in this Making Of:

• Modeling
• Texturing
• Lighting
• Composition
• Post-production

The software I used included:

• Autodesk 3ds Max 2009
• UVLayout Pro v2
• xNormal
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• mental ray

References

As a reference for modeling I used this truck photograph as a base model (Fig.01). The picture came from sxc.hu, which is a free photographs site.

Modeling

To model this truck I used 3ds Max 2009. As I used photographs to make the model, I did not use blueprints on this occasion and what helped me a lot was the technique of real "Good Sense".  The proposed design was changed a little based on the art director's wishes, but as you can see the majority of the truck is very similar to the photograph (Fig.02 – 03).




Including all the small parts like nuts and bolts, the body modeling came to 1082 pieces. A good tip for modeling this time of work is to model all parts separately. This really helps with not only the modeling, but also the texturing, and in general it leaves the model really light (Fig.04 – 05).



To model the scene I used a plane that was really segmented as a Noise to form the irregularity off the ground. For the stones I modeled a simple geometry with four different formats. To make the distribution I used the Hair and Fur modifier, which is perfect for this kind of work because it spreads the shapes randomly and also changes the scale and the rotation to generate an uneven distribution.