Making Of 'Old Cafe'

Introduction

Hello, my name is Narek Gabazyan. The original idea for this work came up when I used to sit up late with my friends in our favorite bar. I decided the recreate the bar digitally in a way that when a person looks at it they can feel all the calmness, gentleness, and spiritual pleasure of the bar, and have the same feeling of relaxation as if he were really there. The modeling of the scene was started shortly after the initial sketch had been produced (Fig.01). I chose to put the main emphasis on the lighting, materials and décor as the modeling part of the scene was quite basic. Besides, in each new project I try to use new methods in rendering, composing and post-production.

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Modeling

As mentioned above I avoided using complex models for this scene as modeling was not of high priority
here (Fig.02 - 05).

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

Texturing & Materials

For creating the main textures for the walls, I found it optimal to make them in Photoshop by combining the texture of a brick wall with a dirty plaster wall (Fig.06).

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

As for the settings of the wall material, I used the settings that can be seen in Fig.07.

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

I used a Bump map for the walls (Fig.08).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Lighting & Camera

For this project I chose V-Ray as my renderer, which became important in terms of the lighting because I used V-Ray lights .The lighting was certainly the most complicated part of this image. It was also my favorite part in terms of being able to realize and express the spirit of my idea (Fig.09 ).

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

I used one V-Ray Plane light for the fill light (light 1), one V-Ray Sphere light to have shadows from the other artificial light in the bar (light 2), and a couple of V-Ray Sphere lights for the lights under the tables (light 3). I also used a V-Ray Physical Camera, which is a very handy tool that allowed me to control the exposure and the aperture; basically, allowing me to control the brightness and contrast in the image, even before post-work (Fig.10).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Rendering

After creating materials for all the objects, adding the lights and setting up the camera, I moved on to the render settings. The render setup was basic. I had the primary bounce with an Irradiance map and the secondary with Light cache.

You can see the settings I used in Fig.11. A RGB pass was the preferable render in EXR format. For post-production I used a Z-Depth pass (Fig.12) and one more render pass for Ambient Occlusion. I also used Override mtl. and Vray2SideMtl (Fig.13).

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Compositing & Post-production

So I ended up with the following passes: Z-Depth, Ambient Occlusion and RGB (Fig.14).

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

In this project I used AfterEffect and the plugin MagicBullet for making color and level corrections (Fig.15).

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

I added a Z-Depth effect, Ambient Occlusion pass, film gain, Chromatic Aberration and some other passes over the main image to give an old film effect (Fig.16).

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

I then added glow and glint around the lamps under the tables (Fig.17).

Fig. 17

Fig. 17



And here is the final image - I hope you enjoy it (Fig.18)!

Fig.18

Thanks to everyone for reading this and thanks to 3DTotal for this opportunity!

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