Software Used:

3ds Max, V-Ray, Photoshop and Lightroom

Introduction:

Hi folks! My name is Gustavo Groppo and I’m a 3D artist currently working in São Paulo, Brazil. My skills are mostly texturing, shading, lighting and rendering. Here I´ll guide you through my working process for the image “Once Upon a Time…” My inspiration for this work came when I first saw No Country for Old Men. I’ve always loved those Western American landscapes and although the film was recorded in Texas, I used photographs from it as a reference so I could create a police scene in a vast desert.

References:

The process of searching for references was important because it helped to give me information that was essential for truthfully recreating the environment I was imagining. As I planned my work place in the desert region of Arizona, in the 1970s, I searched for references of road signs of that time, police cars, vegetation and elements that would bring detail to the image, showing what really existed there (Fig.01).

Fig.01

Modeling:

The modeling of the elements in the scene was extremely simple. The models are derived from primitive cylinders and planes, which I modified using the Edit Poly tools (Fig.02).

Fig.02

The car model was started by my friend Fernando Ometto for a job that would have small toy vehicles. So, for my work, I needed to renovate it to match a Ford Galaxie 500, year 66 or 67. The general shape of the car was kept, but I changed some items such as the wheel, siren, break bush, tires and other details pertinent to the actual model (Fig.03).

Fig.03

Vegetation and Stones:

After gathering some references of Arizona desert vegetation, it was time to plan how to achieve a convincing result. I tested some plugins for modeling plants. Some of these were completed models that I later modified, which gave me a lot of control and the ability to edit the shapes of plants. I achieved the best visual results using the Hair & Fur system  in 3ds Max . On average, each plant had 700 "wires", which required too much processing power and memory to render, so I decided to separate the plants into two areas: foreground and background. Plants that are closer to the camera are Hair & Fur and for the backgound, I pre-rendered a wide variety of models and applied them as textures on simple planes, with the opacity channel (Fig.04).

Fig.04

For the modeling of the stones, I used a plugin called Rock Generator, developed by Alessandro Ardolino. On it I was able to create a wide variety of rocks at different scales, and their forms were easily edited using the FreeForm Deformation tool. With the models of the stones ready, I used V-Ray Scatter to distribute them randomly on the landscape (Fig.05).

Fig.05

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