Intro and Thank you's (Academy oscar's type):

Welcome to everyone reading the overview about the making of "A little bit of Bricolage " images.
These two pictures have been made to "tell a story". If you see them in any order, they make sense. It could be that broken down, damaged place that was turned into a fine looking balcony, or maybe the fine balcony just has been left...Time did the rest.

I must thanks to my fantastic wife for all the help she gave me in this process, which wouldn't turn out this nice without her help. She came out with some ideas for the whole concept, did a lot of research work, from the furniture, to background pics. She was also fundamental in the artistic composition and combination of materials and colours. The 3D was entirely left to me. So together, we could do these two scenes in 2 days total.

Of course, i couldn't go on without thanking Tom Greenway and 3DTotal for making such a wonderful set of texture CD's, from the first to the very last. Each one of the whole bunch is unique and undoubtfully a great add to any 3D artist, as you can see. These pictures were made solely from 3DTotal's "Total Texture's" CDs. The "clean" picture uses only textures from CD 6 - Clean Textures, as the "damaged" picture uses combinations of several clean textures along with many dirt, grime and graffiti masks and maps from CD 5 - Dirt and Graffiti.

Ok, so now begins the most technical and practical part of this overview. Most people probably will skip the previous part, i know :) This is not intended to be a step by step tutorial, rather a detailed overview of the process for making such a scene. Although I have used 3dsmax, other software users certainly will understand the concepts used. Ride on!

Choose which part you would like to know, or just continue reading:

-Whole Concept and references

-Part one "Clean Scene"

-Decorative Modelling
-Texturing, Lighting and Rendering

- Part two "Damaged Scene" coming next week

-Modelling
-Texturing
-Lighting and Rendering

With other images I found with several items that would help me later, I kind of made a "mind" collage from each. I also got from there some reference pics that would help me out later, such as these:
A little tip here, you can go to the site www.unopiu.es which was the one that i got these references from.

I also thouht it would be nice to have each scene on it's own enviroment and time. I wanted to make one at night and one in the morning. I did a web search for both to find some background pictures, and i found these that suited very nicely. I just made some colour correct to them and thats it. I love the bird's one :)

Modelling for this scene had an important role, since the textures itself wouldn't be enough to express what I want...a cosy balcony. Modelling was divided in two: the architectural elements and decorative elements. I did this because I wanted to use the architecture in the "Damaged Scene".
I'm going to skip the Architectural part, mainly because I prefer to write about that in the other scene, as modelling is much simpler. So I'll just write about the decorative modelling.
With the references I've found, I modelled the chair, long chair, and table and wheel cart with a combination of bevelled splines and chamfered boxes converted to editable polys. The most important thing to notice when modelling hard-edged surfaces is that you always should have a little chamfer, bevel, and fillet on corner edges. That will make your objects more real and make light shine in them. Adding low-resolution small spheres to make the screws, and that's it. Here are some pics that better shows the modelling of these parts.

The bottles, candles, glasses, vase and apples were made from simple revolve, lathe objects with a spline. A tip to make the liquids and that applies to the candles to look better is making the splines top vertex's lower a bit, while leaving a little higher at the point where the liquid meets the glass. In the candles, this helps to have an effect of candle melting. Here are some images depicting this tip:

	Lowering top vertices to make liquid density. The apple modelling is also simple. I consists in drawing a spline like this: and then applying a simple ffd modifier (lattice) to alter is symmetry a little bit. here's the result:
One model that is easy but boring to make is the lamp, because it has its entire frame and also the covering glass. I simply made several boxes and joined them together, them made more boxes to make the glass. Again, the actual light lamp and support are another lathe:
For vegetation, I used a mix of billboard along with some real 3D bush meshes that 3dsmax provide as procedural objects. They worked great! Just to finish, i actually modelled the candles light. It is again a lathe object with some noise applied to give randomness:

This image was created using a few of the hundreds of textures from the Total Texture CDs - very comprehensive texture collections priced with the hobbyist in mind. To see more examples, download free
samples and read full details follow this link