A little bit of Bricolage

Part 1 - Modelling

Ok, I'm going to describe a little about the modelling of this scene. Before I begin, let me say that I applied displacement maps to almost every object in this scene, appearing that actual modelling is more complicated. It isn't! I'm a big fan of the phrase "It doesn't have to be right, it just have to look right!" This means, among other things, that you don't actually need to model everything, texture everything, blablabla... Beyond this area, the arcs are incomplete, the walls don't have chamfers, etc. So I only concentrate in what is seen. Of course you should not forget to model and texture elements that make shadow or appear in reflections, even if they're not visible directly...that happens a lot.

Walls, pillars and pieces of wood are simple chamfered boxes. Don't forget, always chamfer your objects a little where edges are visible.

The arches are lofts consisting of an arch path and a rectangle spline. I modeled with loft because it allows textures to flow through its surface.

Path, shape and resulting arch

Path, shape and resulting arch

The metal plates were simple planes that i poly-edited to get a bumping shape. Then i added shell modifier which adds a little thickness:

Metal plate model

Metal plate model

The paint bucket was a simple lathe object with a renderable spline as the wire. The cover is a cylinder with some cap segments edited to have a bent form:

Paint bucket model

Paint bucket model

That's about all the modelling in this scene. Very very simple. Let's get into texture work

Ok, texturing this scene was a lot different from the "clean" one, as you can see:) I had a lot of fun doing it, as I believe it came out cool!
Texturing isn't one of my strong points in 3D work, and I got this as a chance to evolve a little bit. Basically, I used two techniques for texturing the whole lot. For one, I tried to use masks and composite materials and maps inside 3dsmax. This worked well for some objects like the arches, where I simply rotated some maps to give randomness:



Here is the material editor layout:

The problem I had with this approach was that if I wanted to make specific marks in specific areas, like humidity spots, I'd have to make a mask and colour map, etc with another uvw map. I used this again in the lower walls that have some graffiti. I had this same material and I just added more uvw maps modifiers with it's own channel so that i could map the graffiti correctly. Of course, all together becomes quite complicated to manage and it simply doesn't give me the liberty to make what I want so I just switched to the second technique I used: Composing in PhotoShop all textures and masks that I wanted to use. In 3dsmax i simply had to take a print screen of the object I wanted to texture (like a wall) and paint in PhotoShop the exact placement of the textures. Here's an example:

mesh of back wall pasted into photoshop added a layer of bricks texture

the masked white paint over the bricks and masked humidity draining

the masked white paint over the bricks and masked humidity draining



As you seen, this way i know what the result will be more accurately, and don't have to worry too much with uvw maps. The most hard stuff to texture and get things right was the floor. I wanted to have a tiled concrete floor with some cracks and an entire area that concrete had been broken and only little gravel and pieces of concrete show up. It was difficult because i had to combine very well the various maps that worked in diffuse, bump and displacement channels. I won't put here all the maps I've used to make the masks and colours, since they are many of them, and i dint use all of the whole maps, I usedspecific areas for masking. Here are the final texture maps:

the displacement isn't very noticeable here.
The only unwrap I had to do was for the paint bucket. I applied a cylindrical mapping to it and used Textporter to unwrap the mesh to PhotoShop. Then mixing some colour maps and adding masks, I got a texture like this. Every map used is from 3DTotal's Textures CD's v5 and v6, except from the paint logo:

Paint bucket textured. Came out very nice to me! I didnt have any corrosion colour map in these cds, so i used one they have that are little brown stones that did the same result :)



The grass was made using adisplacement map with a mask done so that it only shows up in the cracks of the concrete and in some spots where water would fall easily, like the corner and right wall.

Every other object was textured using the same method as described above, so no reason to go on. Let's move into something further. Lighting and Rendering

Lighting and Rendering

As I said in the lighting part of "clean" scene, I used Vray to render the scenes. I wanted to simulate morning light,
so I only created a direct light with shadows to have sunlight, which produces some hard shadows.
I used displacement for almost every object in the scene, leaving only the metal plates, paint bucket and woods out. This was a major render killer as it actually "killed" my mad 2700 1gb ram two times...yes, it reboot all alone two times!!! And when I finally made it, the render took me 9 hours!
Now I wanted to have a small volumetric light effect to depict the morning haze. I absolutely couldn't do it in the same render I did for the scene. I hide all my objects, applied a volumetric effect to my direct light. I also created a simple radial gradient map with some noise and applied it in the projector channel in my light. The result was a nice volumetric light pass that I added to my original image as screen mask mode.

After rendering my image I opened it in Photoshop and made a few changes, like some brightness correction, noise adding and 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. Here's a wireframe and final rendering:

That's it! I hope you all liked my scenes and this overview, feel free to critic and comment. You have my email :)

2004 Miguel Madaíl de Freitas | Big Spot - Computer Graphics Studio

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