Making Of 'Dead City'

"Dead City" is one of the fourteen locations which I'm preparing for my music clip. I don't want to say too much about the story, because some things can change (there's still a lot of work to do) and - what is more important - I might kill the punch line. Anyway, in this scene I wanted to show abandoned city - dirty, dusty, sun-baked - one can say: without any signs of life, but simultaneously carrying hope that life (or life forms) can exist in most adverse conditions, most unexpected place and it resurrect very quickly.

Photos and workflow

Most often the workflow looks like this: sketch, modelling, texturing, lightning, rendering, post-production. But I found out a long time ago that I'm not a painter and I'll never be able to reach the level of realism that nature presents. I could make a 100 layers in Photoshop with dirt, rust, cracks (and finally add a few for almost every texure), but nature will be better in that area. So, that's why I decided to make some real photos first and then - based on prepared textures - I started to model. I borrowed digital camera (Canon 400d), took my own, old, dusty analogue camera (Revueflex SD1) and I started looking for interesting places to take photos. With help of my sister I took about 1200 digital photos and about 360 analogue photos. Rusty cars, ruins, broken roofs and walls, old trains - I photographed everything that can be useful in making the clip.

Texture Making

There were 2 problems with photos. The first one: When people saw a man who is running across the streets and taking photos of every building they start to think, that I'm a thief or some kind of criminal - so, not every time was I able to take photo at right angle and position - because of that there was a problem with correct perspective on photos. The second: There were a lot of unwanted elements on pictures - like antennas, cars, flowers, cables, etc. So with these photos I took them into Photoshop and started doing some retouching. Below you can find example of work with one of the buildings.

Modelling

When the textures were ready I started to model some buildings. Huge advantage of this style of work is that you have all dimensions, distances, etc. right on the picture. You don't need to worry if "that window" is 160 or 180 cm height, or is "this tier" has 250, 293, or 310 cm... All models (except plants) were made in XSI.

Street Car

Streetcars - like the one in my scene - have moved across my born town (they weren't so dirty and rusty of course). I thought that placing this object in my scene will increase mystery mood. Left on a crossroads, with open doors, overgrown by grass and shrubs. Strange. People have abandoned this place really quickly... When I was creating this streetcar I was using traditional workflow: first I found some reference photos then I modelled it, textured and placed it in the scene. Textures for streetcar were made without any "photo base". I mixed and painted several layers of dirt and rust and I added ambient occlusion layer (baked before).

Plants

Making vegetation was the hardest part of the work. Not because I didn't know how to do it, but because I want to keep rendering times as low as possible and - simultaneously - freedom of camera movement - that's why I didn't want to use billboards. I'm just not sure what the final camera movement will be. Finally I used X-FROG for trees and shrubs, "Ivy generator" for ivy and ingenious plug-in "DPIT Nature Spirit" for grass and dry leaves. DPIT is a plug-in which gives possibility to "paint" (clone) plants and other objects on surfaces (by mouse or pen - which I used for dry leaves) or use bitmaps for this task (which I used for grass). Textures for plants were taken from XFROG.

Linear Workflow

When I started to make renderings with GI (some time ago), I was trying to find everything about it on the internet. And I found several articles about linear workflow. If you are interested in details, please look on the internet - there's a lot of materials on this topic. In the brief, the whole thing is about gamma. Monitor displays pictures with gamma 2,2 (1,8 for MAC), but the render engine works in linear scale (gamma=1,0). All you have to do to work in LWF is that you should give your rendered pictures and colours in linear scale. You can do that by adding gamma correction with parameter 0,455 (this means 1/2,2 - for PC). There's a lot of advantages when using LWF: light goes deeper in the scene, rendering is natural and physically correct, you don't have to worry about colour mapping. Of course you don't have to use LWF (you can use colour mapping, desaturation, contrast, etc), but for me it's the best and the easiest way to make correct renderings.

Below - quick comparison: In every rendering I've used the same materials and render settings. No lights (one of the spheres is illuminated).

On the left - linear workflow (Colour mapping - linear multiply, Dark multi: 1, Bright multi: 1, Gamma: 2,2)

In the middle - no linear workflow (Colour mapping - HSV Exponential, Dark multi: 3, Bright multi: 3, Gamma: 1) (too dark)

On the right - no linear workflow (Colour mapping - linear multiply, Dark multi: 1, Bright multi: 1, Gamma: 2,2) (light but colours are washed out)

LFW Settings

LFW Settings

Lighting and Rendering

I really don't know how this shot (it will last about 10 or maybe 20 seconds) will look between previous and the next one, that's why I decided to make a very natural, well-lighted render - without any mood. The reason is that I want to have a lot of possibilities when editing this final image. I can brighten it up or darken it down, I can make this picture look greenish or leave it as it is - with a brown shade. In the scene I used only one light - physical sun and physical sky. (For rendering I used Cinema4D and V-Ray)

Render Settings

Render Settings

Compositing and colour correction

As I said before I wanted this scene to look dirty, dusty, sun-baked. I had to use colour correction. I gave the picture a "coffee-cocoa" shade, I made the light and dark glow also, I "changed" the sky and...that's all.

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