Making Of 'The Japanese'

Diego Querol takes us through some of the key processes involved in making his Sandra Tarruella-inspired architectural piece, The Japanese.

My name is Diego Querol and I am 3D artist based in Spain. I want to share my making of article with you after the success of my first piece, Creative Coffee. This making of breaks down the process for making the image The Japanese, which was inspired by Sandra Tarruella's interior design.

In this scene, I wanted to pay special attention to texturing and lighting while trying to get something different and original in terms of interior design.

References

As I said previously, I based my scene on the work of Sandra Tarruella; taking mainly architectural and furniture details from her architectural designs. After my initial research, I then designed my own interior design layout, keeping the space distribution pretty much the same, though also adding some extra furniture from my library.

Modeling

The architectural model itself is pretty basic, but to make the scene look more realistic, I always like to go through small details which make the space far more interesting. For the focus of this making of, I wanted to show how to model the 5-meter hanging lamps in my final image. I think this is a pretty interesting process that you have probably already encountered to some degree in your own work.

After calculating dimension and parameters based on the shape of the lamp, in this case a cylinder; I tessellated by face on one of the Height Segments and then selected the wanted edges to convert on a separated shape.

After this, I made the shape into an editable spline that was visible in the viewport and the renderer.

Then I copied the model as many times as I needed to get the right height. Another modeling tip on this scene, I found, was to grow an ivy pallet wall. I built a model using a simple wood pallet and used the useful grow ivy plug-in.

Texturing

Texturing is my favorite part of the creation process. In my opinion, having the right shaders and showing really good textures really helps make the next steps such as the lighting really easy.

In this scene, I want to share one tip I learned in a tutorial by Alex Roman. I use this technique a lot in my work to make objects appear more realistic, and this scene was no exception. I used VRayDirt to remark the edges of my objects.

Lighting

For the environment lighting, I used the typical VRaySky linked to the VRaySun. As you can see in the image below, the VRaySun was pretty big. This made nice soft shadows in the image, but as a result, I needed to increase the subdivisions in VRaySun to avoid the noise.

Doing this affected the rendering time, so I had to be careful with the material settings. The intensity is quite important too; I prefer to use really small sun intensity values, as this lets me have better control over the environment. For the product shelves I used V-Ray planes, and for the hanging lamps I just used V-Ray spheres with warm color.

Camera Settings

Having kept in mind that this is an interior, I set the F-number to 4 then adjusted my overall light by making the ISO 150.

At this point, I had a pretty good balance between shadows, reflections and highlights. The last step was just to adjust my exposure by changing the shutter speed. I chose 60 as a pretty accurate setting.

I also used V-Ray Frame Buffer and Exponential Color Mapping for interiors; this gave me greater control over the contrast in the environment and burning on the raw render.

V-Ray Settings

I used V-Ray Frame Buffer and Exponential Color Mapping Gamma 2.2 in my interior; this gave me greater control over the levels and curves on the raw render.

The settings were pretty basic too (see below). Because I was rendering at a high resolution, and cared specifically about having good resolution textures and good light settings, I focused mainly on the anti-aliasing.

Post-production

For post-production work, I used the render elements from V-Ray.

Personally, I prefer the RAW elements (reflection, refraction, total lighting, shadows, lighting and so on) and blending them with soft light and Screen mode in Photoshop.

I hope you found useful information in this article, and if you have seen something that you can improve or you have a better workflow process, I am always open to listening and learning from artists; in my opinion, that's the way it works best!

Related links
Head over to Diego Querol's website
Enjoy another of his images: Creative Coffee
Sandra Tarruella has been a big influence, check out their site

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