'3D Studio Max'

The texturing part was interesting because I had the opportunity to use the UVLayout program to do the UVs. I like this program a lot because it is easy to use (although at first it might seem a bit weird), and has a lot of great features. I strongly recommend you try it out!

Most of the objects in the scene have normal V-Ray textures, and the different texture maps that I used were edited in Photoshop. I used plane, box and cylinder UV-mappings. The seats, were exported into ZBrush for detailing, piece by piece.

I had to export the mesh from Max as an .obj file to import it into UVLayout. I edited the UVs, exported the model to an .obj, imported it into ZBrush and, after putting in some folds, I finally exported the model back to 3ds Max with the appropriate normal maps. The texturing was not that special on the seats; I used the normal maps from ZBrush and normal mapped horses (Fig.16), which I took from a reference photo and created a normal map with CrazyBump. I was planning to use a texture map for the seats, but after some test renderings I realised that the differences between using a texture map and just using a diffuse colour were close to none. (Fig.17)

Rendering was a pretty straightforward process. The important thing to note here is that in V-Ray gamma correction is useful because of the way that V-Ray outputs images in non RGB colour. For this project I used these settings (Fig.18) for the colour correction. For most projects, however, a colour correction of 2.2 in the colour mapping rollout should do, or setting the colour correction curve like this should fix it equally as well (Fig.19).

The hard part was finding a good camera angle. After spending some time going around the scene I found some camera angles that I liked, but the ones from Fig.20 and Fig.21 are my favourites. After I found the camera angles that I wanted to render, I just pumped up some settings in V-Ray and set up the anti-aliasing and filter settings (Fig.22). And that was it!

For this image I did very little post production work, mainly because of the colour corrections that I applied in V-Ray. Post production was limited to simply blurring some areas, editing some reflections a little and also adding a signature.

To finish, I would like to say that I really loved working on this model, and hope that you have enjoyed this “Making Of”. Thank you for taking the time to read it.