Making of 'Walther P99'
Introduction
Hello everybody, I would like to present you with the making of my latest image: "Walther P99".
Modeling
Before starting to model the P99, I searched for as many different reference photos as I could find on the Internet, so that I could understand the form of the object better.
I decided to start the image by modelling the cylinder head, because it was the easiest. Then I attacked the modelling of the pistol grip. For this step, I started with a box in editable patch, and then converted it to edit poly to add the details. I finally finished with the silencer, which seemed very easy to make after modelling the pistol grip! (Fig.01 - Fig.05)
Materials
As far as the materials were concerned, in the scene I essentially used Arch & Design. Starting with the plastic of the pistol grip, I used a noise to recreate the grainy appearance of the material. I then added rounded corners to create the soft edges on the model (Fig.06).
For the metal parts of the pistol, I created a map in black and white in Photoshop, drawing on the reference photos that I had. This map served for the bump and the anisotropy of the material. For the diffuse, I used RGB Multiply to give a tint to my material, without forgetting the rounded corners (Fig.07).
And finally, for the ground I used a high definition map of concrete. I added a gradient ramp to recreate the dark area present in the background of the image, and an RGB Multiply to tint the diffuse (Fig.08).
Lighting
For the lighting, I used a simple skylight with an HDR map (Fig.09 & Fig.10).
Render
I wanted to render a high definition image in this scene using a minimum rendering time to justify the use of a normal pass, rather than creating a three-point lighting setup which would need a longer rendering time and less work in post-production.
For the indirect lighting, I used Final Gather with the settings shown in Fig.11.
I think I succeeded in correctly making a render in high definition (1950x1100), with a minimal calculation time - only 1 hour, 30 minutes to make the scene, with all the passes, on an old Pentium 4. The 3ds Max output image can be seen in Fig.12.
Post-Production
Post production was the most important step in the project. Up until this stage, I just had an image with a flat light created by the skylight. Because of this, I rendered a normal pass so that I could play in real time with a three-point lighting setup. I also rendered a pass to recreate the rounded corners on the normal pass and an ambient occlusion pass allowed me to recreate, the shadows present on the output image from Max. Once done, I extracted the red, green and blue layers to play with my three-point lighting in real time. I added a little depth of field... and voila! (Fig.13)
The final image can be seen in Fig.14.
Fig.14
Conclusion
I really loved working on this image, and I particularly enjoyed the techniques I got to use in post-production. They proved very efficient for a fixed image and allowed me to considerably reduce the rendering time!
I hope you have enjoyed this "Making Of".
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