The Making Of 'CGRecord CH1'

Leandro Silva describes the techniques he used for his popular entry to the CG Record Rendering Competition.

Hi everyone! First of all, I would like to thank 3dtotal for the opportunity to write this making of article, and provide some insights about one of my latest projects for the CG Record Rendering Competition.

For this contest, participants were invited to recreate the entire environment of the Crescent House designed by Saota & Antoni Associates, with the only restriction keeping the basic house geometry as it was.

Concept & references

The inspiration for this work emerged when I tried to imagine what this house and its surroundings could look like. I wanted to create a simple, quiet natural atmosphere that, most importantly, expressed a natural extension of the house into the landscape.

As a first step, I collected several references about the building, landscape, materials, mood and lighting that expressed the concept I was after.

The final image

The final image

Basic setup

Once I gathered the references for the project, I started by configuring the units setup and the gamma. I always work with Gamma 2.2 and Linear Workflow. Here are the general scene setup settings.

The basic set up in 3ds Max

The basic set up in 3ds Max

Modeling

The main 3D model of the house was provided to the participants of the competition by CG Record. I began work on this by making some adjustments/improvements to the shape, mostly chamfering the edges and fixing some modeling issues, so then I could focus on the atmosphere and the environment of the building straight away.

After the exterior was complete, I then added the interior furnishing such as chairs, tables, lights and curtains to fill up the kitchen, the bedrooms and the living areas. You can see how the basic model looked here.

Tweaking the exterior of the model and adding the furniture

Tweaking the exterior of the model and adding the furniture

Environment & vegetation

The terrain model was created with a simple plane which I converted to an Editable Poly, added a noise modifier and deformed with a few push/pull tools to enhance the effect of terrain imperfections.

To scatter the vegetation, I used the Forest Pack Pro plug-in to achieve a more random result with different types of models, mostly from R&D; iCube and Evermotion. I began by spreading the grass with different types and sizes, and then added some flowers and leaves, the bushes and finally the trees.

An overview of the scattered vegetation in the 3ds Max viewport

An overview of the scattered vegetation in the 3ds Max viewport

Camera setup

I adjusted the camera placement throughout the process, exploring the various options for positioning the cameras. I think the most important thing is to always try and capture the best lighting and composition of the scene – showing the building, the environment or simple details in the best, most appealing and realistic way.

You can see the V-Ray Physical Camera settings from both shoots here

You can see the V-Ray Physical Camera settings from both shoots here

Lighting

In my opinion, lighting is one of the most significant elements in 3D visualization, as it emphasizes the mood and the atmosphere of an image.

For this project, I used a HDRI Map inside a V-Ray Dome Light (default), using Peter Guthrie's HDRI 1224 Clear Sky and 2028 Dusk, combined with a V-Ray Sun to get strong shadows and warm highlights. In the night shoot, I also placed some additional V-Ray Lights that throw warm light from the interior.

Here are the HDRI settings used for both views in the scene

Here are the HDRI settings used for both views in the scene

You can see these HDRI settings apply to the clay renders here

You can see these HDRI settings apply to the clay renders here

Materials & texturing

In this step of the process, it's important to collect real material references to have a good base and understanding for texturing the materials in the scene. Most of the textures are self-made, based on those available at Arroway and CGTextures, with specific adjustments in Photoshop (contrast, color, dirt) to get a better result.

Here you can see a couple of the more interesting materials from this project: water, stone, wall and glass

Here you can see a couple of the more interesting materials from this project: water, stone, wall and glass

Render setup

I rendered this scene with V-Ray and aimed to keep render times acceptable with an Irradiance Map and Light Cache solution. Also, I enabled some render elements to use later in the post-production stage.

Here are the final render settings that I usually use

Here are the final render settings that I usually use

These are the final raw renders

These are the final raw renders

Post-production

For the post-production phase, I generally focused on making little tweaks and adding some artistic retouching with the main objective of enhancing the atmosphere and ‘beauty' of the raw images.

In the images here, I added some Photoshop corrections as follows:

1. Raw render
2. Curves
3. Brightness/contrast
4. Levels
5. Hue/saturation
6. Color balance
7. V-Ray Reflection
8. V-Ray Refraction
9. V-Ray extra texture
10. Light and shadow
11. V-Ray Zdepth
12. Sharpen

Showing the corrections made in Photoshop

Showing the corrections made in Photoshop

Final images

That's all! Thank you for reading it. I hope you enjoyed this article and feel free to ask anything in the comment section below.

The final images

The final images

Related links

Check out more of Leandro Silva's work over on his website
For your texturing needs, try Arroway and CGTextures
More info on the CG Record Rendering Competition

Fetching comments...

Post a comment