Making Of ' Setubal Beach'

Introduction

Hello! My name is Douglas Shimada, I'm 24 years old and I live in São Paulo, Brazil. This work is part of a demo reel I am doing as a course completion assignment for Melies - Cinema and Animation School.

My objective was to do a realistic external scene, where I could study organic material and light. I've divided the Making Of in sections so it is more organized - these are: modeling, texturing, light and post-production.

Modeling

First of all I modeled all the scene objects in Softimage XSI, starting with the boat (Fig.01) and then the background objects (Fig.02), always prioritizing models with the least polygon number possible, so all the details could be made using maps, such as displacement and bump. The sea is a really big grid and the sand was separated into three grids so I could have more control when I textured it (Fig.03).

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

I also created some pebbles and sticks, so the sand would look dirtier. I used simple geometry because there are over 2500 of those pebbles in scene, so if it was a high poly model the scene would be too heavy and hard to render.

I created three different pebble models, duplicated it and then spread it through the sand grid (Fig.04 - 05).

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

Texturing

Well, before I even started texturing, I needed to define what the sky would look like, so I could define the reflection and gloss map for the sea and the sand. I downloaded some pictures from CGTextures and created my own sky with Photoshop (Fig.07).

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

With the sky ready it was time to apply the textures to the scene. In the boat, for example, I used Photoshop again to paint it and made some diffuse, specular and bump maps. But as you can see in Fig.08, I also used a bump map I made in ZBrush. That's because in there I could make more relevant relief for the boat (Fig.09).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

The first thing I did for the sand was export the grid I'd created in XSI to ZBrush so I could do all the relief work and define where it would be wet or dry (Fig.10). After that I exported the bump, displacement and normal maps (Fig.11).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Back in XSI applied the maps on the grid and made a basic lighting set up. I also made a light bake. With that I would know exactly where all the level differences of my sand would be in the mesh (Fig.12 - 13). That allowed me to paint the reflection and gloss map with precision and I define where the wetter places would be (Fig.14).

The same process was used on other parts of the sand and sea.

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

Lighting

Every object has its own light set. I decided to do this so I could have more control over the indirect light and color temperature (Fig.15).

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

For the sand and the sea I created a grid with the sky picture I had made so it could be used as a reflection picture (Fig.16). And because not every part of the sand reflects, I created an environment using the same image to emit light with Final Gather (Fig.17).

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

Post-Production

This is the render alone (no post-production) (Fig.18).

Fig. 18

Fig. 18

Now here's the render with the sky I made in Photoshop (Fig.19).

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

And finally with color correction, grains, DOF and vignetting (Fig.20).

Fig. 20

Fig. 20

That is it! I hope you all liked it and I wish you all success!

Douglas Shimada

Enter content...

Fetching comments...

Post a comment