Making Of 'Desert Life'

Introduction

A big welcome to everyone reading this little overview about the making of "Desert Life".

The idea to this picture came to me with the recent happenings in the middle east. It made me remember about the nice colors and architectural elements about oriental and desert places, all being destroyed in these days.

So I thought about doing a quiet and nice place in the desert, where people used to live, but somehow, they run away afraid, leaving their homes standing there by the wind. This is "Desert Life", no matter how, it's always a lonely place.

At least, this is what this picture makes me feel.

Ok, I'm going to write about how I did this picture, from scratch to finish. I'm not going into big details, rather I'll try to explain the procedures and techniques.
 

First things First

After deciding that my picture had something to do with the desert, I searched the web for any reference pics of houses and styles and I came up with these very nice. These pictures gave me what I needed, some reference for modelling, and later for texturing.

Modelling

I modelled the walls first so that I had notion of the whole space. I had a very good idea about the final picure, including perspective and lighting, so I didn't model anything that wouldn't appear later.

The walls were made with an editable spline extruded so that I can add noise and bends to it.

Left: editable spline that makes the wall, Centre: bevel modifier applied (use bevel instead of extrude to get round edges, Right: wall after applying noise and bend modifiers

TIP: when using extrude or bevel modifier in 3dsmax, if you are planning to use noise, bend or any similar operation, don't forget to check the "Grid" under "Cap Type". This will add invisible vertexs to your model, thus making it much more able to deform.



The same procedure was used to build the other wall, except this one had the top edge very smooth, very round.

I couldn't just make a front profile of it. I made a side profile and then opened the doors with boolean operacions. After making both walls I made a backstage in each wall, to simulate the interior walls. In the second wall I made some openings in the ceiling to let light enter through it.

Altough it is not seen due to blackness, a blue cabinet was built with simple boxes inside the room that is covered with the long curtain. The ground was made with a simple box, in which I changed a bit to add some bumps. The stairs were again built with editable splines, bevel modifier, and a little bit of noise to add displacement. The metal plate and wood bars were made out of simple boxes.

The curtain was made with a simple plane which I then modelled with editable poly to simulate wind blowing it. Finally, the water drainer was modelled with a cylinder that I altered some faces to make a small "mouth" in it (left).

Here's how everything looks like together:

Ok, having done the modeling part, it is time to move on to texturing the whole stuff.

...please move on to the 2nd part, to find out about texturing, and lighting...

Texturing


Well, I hope you are all still there :). For those who are interested, I'll try to explain how I did the texturing work for my scene. This is were 3DTotal's "Total Textures" CD's come in. They are simply GREAT!I saw every each one of them, and each adds enormous value to the 3 cd collection. I needed to find several types of textures, from bricks to sand, to metal plates, etc. Indeed I found every one of them in the cds. The only ones I had to get from other sources where the plants and the birds, mostly taken out from reference pics. An important thing to say is that although I have mixed some textures, some objects were textured using only the texture right away from the cd. The walls textures were built using a combination of several maps, such as plaster, bricks, corrosion and dirt maps. One image says more than a thousand words, so I leave you with these ones to understand better. This texture was made by combining the maps above mainly, painting some elements like doors, adding some dirt maps for humidity spots, sun-burned zones and some areas that we can see bricks under plaster. The bump maps are just the same, just some alterations in Levels and hues.



Texturing the floor was again funny, as I again mixed up some textures and dirt maps, and painted some elements, like depresses and cracks. See it here:





Texturing the other elements was very easy, as I almost only had to choose a texture from the cd and apply it to my object. The curtain, for example was textured only with a map of fabric from the cds, that I changed its colour from blue to brown, and made a small opacity map to simulate cracks in it due to decay. Here it is:

So that's pretty much it about the texturing work. It may look simple of course, but making textures for specific objects is very time consuming, but in the end, you get much more realism and detail otherwise you would not. So, for those still interested in reading this "never-ending" overview, ill continue in part 3 to tell you about illumination and compositing work.

...please move on to the 3nd part, to find out about the lighting and composition...

Illumination

I wanted to make my scene to be lit by sunlight almost at sunset, and I wanted to take advantage of the nice soft shadows and contrast that it would make.

I put a almost white/orange light in the right side of the image, and added some blue omni lights to simulate light from the sky.

I tried illuminating this scene without GI, as you can see, it pretty much came out nicely!

Composition

As for compositing, after rendering my image I opened it in Photoshop and made a few changes, like some brightness correction, noise adding and some color correction. One special task I made for this picture was adding some vegetal elements and birds. The big bird was taken out of a picture I found in the web, which I masked it and overlayed it in my sky. The other birds were drawn and layered in several places. Some plants were added directly in 3dsmax but others were added in Photoshop, again with masking of photographs. I then did some color correction and darkening in the areas around the plants to simulate soft shadows.

To finish the compositing, I added a duplicate layer of my picture and set it to screen mode, and then I made a threshold of it to get a contrasted black/white version of my picture in order to get a soft glow around parts of the picture that are brighter. After that, I just had to blur it a bit.

Thats it! I made my very first tutorial / Project overview ever! I hope you all liked it

See you all soon ;)

Miguel Madaíl de Freitas

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