Created in:

Chaos Group V-Ray 1.5 & Photoshop

Introduction:

This is my very first Making Of in four years working with 3D graphics, and it is a pleasure to share my work process here, with you. I graduated in Digital Design from São Paulo, Brazil, but my passion is computer graphics. In this Making Of, I’ll try to give you an objective explanation of my work titled, “5 o’clock”. So, here we go...

Inspiration:

As an attentive taster of English teas, together with my passion of product visualisation and appreciation of the English culture, I decided to build this typical English tea-time. In this scenery made from scratch I tried to achieve a photo real quality work.

Sketching:

Before I start the modelling process I usually make a fast sketch, with primitives, to test the composition, lighting and some render setups. I think this is very interesting because since the beginning I had a brief idea about how the final image would look. This sketch was not a complex work; just boxes, cylinders and planes shaped to the objects that I had in mind. The lighting sketch was just to test how the shadows would behave, to define its direction and the mood I wanted to achieve. For accurate setups like GI and image based lighting with HDR maps I work just on the final lighting.

The Modelling Process:

The modelling work began here. It was time to get lots of references of cups, jars, breakfast stuff, tea stuff, and other kitchen objects. To create the objects I just used polygon modelling on primitives, like box and cylinder, modified with bevel, extrude, cut, chamfer, lathe, etc. I consider this modelling work to be basic, but the union of many objects will give the work a complex look. For some objects I used photo references which I took from the Internet, such as tea boxes, coffee and honey bottles. All of the others I created myself. One very important thing that 3D modellers, mostly beginners, have to keep in mind when working with many objects in a scene, to avoid the slowing down of computer memory, is to smooth the objects just in the render iterations, then they will have a low poly count to work on and the processes will be fast. Some objects I prefer to model outside the scene and then merge them, or use an XREF, to link it.  Fig01 shows the wireframe of the scene overview. The tea tin can be seen in Fig02, shelf support in Fig03, coffee cups in Fig04, tea cup in Fig05, sugar pack in Fig06, coffee jar in Fig07, and the flag can be seen in Fig08.