Texturing

Let’s pass to the next step (the most important of this project). First I set up the UV’s (only planar, box or cylindrical). This is like a sketch, because after I’ll paint the textures the UV’s will be adjusted in order to give the best result. Here is a screen shot with the UV’s after finishing the texturing process. You can see that they are stretched or damaged in some places, but this won’t be seen in the final image.

The texture painting process is quite similar for all the objects, so I’ll explain it only for the back wall, the one with a window on it. So, first of all set the UV to planar, then export the wire frame. You can either take a snapshot of the view port (if it is a planar UV) or use the Texporter plug in.

p>After that, just take the file into your favorite painting software (in this case it was Photoshop) and start painting over it. I started painting by taking a nice wall texture from www.environment-textures.com and put it as the base layer.

I also reduced the opacity of the layer that contains the wire frame so I can see what I’m painting and where I’m painting.

From now on it’s all up to the artistic sense and the imagination of the painter. I wanted to make the wall a brown-yellow color, so I started by creating a new layer and fill it with the desired color tone.

Then I changed the blending mode to ‘Multiply’ and reduced the Opacity to 70%.

Introduction

Computers and application software are evolving at a tremendous pace. New methods and technical improvements are being introduced with every software release and today creating photorealistic renderings is just a couple of mouse clicks away.

Going back a couple of years, raytracing, particularly raytraced reflections, was nothing more than a fake simulation with the refmap.gif file for 3ds(max) users whereas the term “Refractions” were arousing just a simple question: Is it possible?. But today we have state-of-the art rendering engines which are available both as standalone and bundled rendering solutions for major 3d software applications aiding the 3d artists to create hyper realistic imagery.

“Global Illumination” or “GI” is one of the techniques available within the contemporary rendering engines which accurately simulates the real world lighting conditions given the proper cpu power and enough time for computations. In today’s production environments usually time is of concern if not the cpu power thus makes GI an expensive method for visualisation. Optimizing quality rendering time with alternative methods has become an essential need for the production process.

If you are dealing with 3d rendering, you probably have heard of the Occlusion method. In the Siggraph 2002 presentation Production-Ready Global Illumination, ILM Technical Director Hayden Landis tells about this alternate method they developed for simulating GI effectively with speed.

Apparently this relatively new technique has been used by many huge production houses for their projects but it has just began to be available as a common toolset for the regular 3d artist like myself

With the introduction and integration of mental ray, 3dsmax has gained a strength in its rendering department, particulary the photo-realistic section. 3dsmax 7 now has the ability to render ambient and reflective occlusion images with the help of a mental ray 3.3 shader.

The Ambient Occlusion method is basically rendering out an occlusion pass(which is a grayscale or a tinted image based on environment map) and then overlaying this image over a flat lit diffuse pass(achieved by ambient lighting, I’ll describe it later) to represent the shadowing caused by the environment. That’s why the method is called Ambient Occlusion, to describe the occlusion(blocking) of the ambient light amount to simulate GI shadows. It is just like rendering your scene with a GI skylight, with no specular highlights or cast shadows and faster than GI.

TOPICS COVERED:

1. General Scene Setup
2. Material Settings
3. HDRI for reflections only
4. Environment Lighting

Global Switches Settings

- Default Lights are off
- Everything else is basically default settings

Irradiance Map Settings

- I set the preset to custom and used the settings shown on the left

Note: I like to enable Show calc phase just so I can see the Irradiance map calculation.

Global Illumination Settings

- Global Illumination is Enabled
- Irradiance map for Primary GI engine with a multiplier of 1.0

-Quasi-Monte-Carlo for Secondary Bounces with a multiplier of 1.0

- Post processing settings are all default

V-Ray Environment Settings

Note: There are no lights in this scene…as in zero. The only thing lighting the scene is the environment light shown on the left.

- GI Environment Skylight override is enabled.
- Reflection/refraction override is enabled.

Note: I used a HDRI map for the reflections in the scene but the the HDRI map does not contribute to the lighting. I could easily use the HDRI in the reflection slot to light the scene by dragging “Map 15″ into the “None” slot of the GI environment.
For this particular scene, basic GI environment lighting worked well so I chose not use a HDRI map in the GI environment slot.

The Ground Plane

In order for the shadows, reflections and GI bounces to render over the background image we need an object in the scene to catch all of that data. For this we will use a matte object.

Note: To match the perspective of the background image I simply rotated the camera by hand until a suitable match was achieved.

Matte Object Settings

Note: to access the V-Ray properties dialog box select an object in the scene and right-click in the viewport. Select V-Ray properties from the quad menu.

- Matte object is enabled and shadows are checked.. This will make the selected objects invisible at rendertime but things like shadows, reflections and GI bounces will still show up.
- Notice you have control over many options like reflection and GI amounts. This is a very useful dialog box because you can control how V-Ray treats scene geometry on a per-object basis.

Here is a closeup of the red metal on the tractor. Notice all of the nice subtle hightlights. This is a combination of the material settings and the HDRI reflections.

In this tutorial I will go through my usual workflow with simple steps (trying to make it as simple as posible), to build a scene, from the preparation for the project (Pre-Pro) untill the final render, as always using Discreet 3D Studio Max, for the modelling, mapping and lighting, and Photoshop/Bodypaint for the texturing based on the great 3D total collection of textures

A good habit from the beginning is to create a special folder for the project, another subfolder for the textures and another for the references. Another advice (I always do it) is to print one of the references so you can look at it, whenever you go to bed or a bathroom break, in this print I usually write some notes and ideas to help me reach the final image

I start with the modelling extruding the floor of the building, then I make cuts on the geometry with the “slice plane” tool or also the “cut” tool, and then I extrude the in negative to make the windows, each time I finish the modelling of one of the elements I also finish the UV mapping, I don’t like to accumulate the UV mapping for the end, a couple of parragraphs below I will explain briefly my tecnic with the mapping.

In this kind of symetrical buildings is very useful to apply the “symetry” modifier, in this way we can save a lot of time and work also this guarantees the perfect location of the windows in both sides.

If the composition of the reference picture satisfyes me, i usually lay the 3D model over the picture as perfectly as possible, in this way I can fix proporion issues, with the hotkey “Alt X” I make the object transparent to make the overlaying easier.

For the antennas and cables I usually model it with renderable splines, making sure that I activated the automatic mapping, I also watch my the poly count, I know for experience that a cable of 4 spans is enough if its going to be from a medium/far distance of the camera.
The trees of the bottom of the picture were made using Onix Tree Pro, Only the visible parts are modelled, in other words they are incomplete trees

For some reason I found more simple to deform the bird neck with some bones, and a skin modifier, in this way I could move the bones in a interactive way to decide the final pose of the animal, (always using the rendering camera, so it has more strenght in the composition

The mapping is without a doubt the heaviest and most boring process when it comes to creating the scene. It is a necessary but not too creative step, also the UV maps are not something spectacular to show around saying “Hey check out my cool UV map”. But in the long run, uvmapping it’s more like a puzzle game. (it has its charm). To describe briefly my mapping process, you just have a few simple rules:

1 – You should not have overaying UVS EVER
2 – The checker map we put on the object has to represent perfect even squares
3 – The objects in the UVeditor should have the same proportion as the ones in the scene
4 – Make sure the orientation of the object is correct in the UVmap editor
5 – It is convenient to optimize the space inside the map

A good way to begin the mapping, is using planar maps to unfold the object and then stitch the individual pieces together, also you could equally stitch the pieces from an automatic mapping, I assigned the hotkey”S” for “stitch” in that way I can select an edge, and hit “S” and I can stitch pieces really fast. Always remember that if you put a lot of efford into the Uvmapping it will be less likely to have problems ahead once we painted the textures in Photoshop

This making of is split into two sections. The first section is a tutorial about making the walls with splines and extrusion, and the second part is the making of The Building scene.

Part 1: Making the walls.
Note:this tutorial is for those that are new to spline modeling. What vertices, segments, or a spline can do is fantastic. I start just about every building this way and once the spline is complete, I convert it to a polygon model and I work from there. But, before doing so, I save a copy of the spline/extrusion model, in case something goes wrong later, I can go back quickly and rebuild the wall..

Let’s get started, I hope you will not have difficulties to follow this tutorial.

1 – First, turn on the snap toggle (both 2D/3D will do it) and from the Shapes tab select the square tool and draw a rectangle like in the pic below.

2 – Right-click on the line while selected and convert the rectangle to an Editable Spline.

3 – On the right under “Start new shape” uncheck the little box.

4 – Make sure your first large rectangle is still selected and draw a smaller shape inside of it.

5 – Now go to the Edit panel and select Segment mode.

6 – Hold down Shift and with the selection tool select all inner segments, highlighted with red in the pic below.

7 – While you’re still holding down Shift, drag the selected rectangle’s all segments to the right, so the cursor will blink blue each time you pass a grid crossing. Now you should have the outline of the wall with two windows.

8 – Click anywhere in the viewport to deselect all segments, so none of them is red. And now let’s do it again: press/hold Shift and select all inner segments, basically the two windows, and drag them to the right, so when the cursor is passing over the grid points, it will comes on in blue. Now you should have 4 windows.

9 – Let’s practice this a little more: click anywhere in the viewport, press/hold Shift and select all segments (the 4 windows you just drew), and this time move them down until you feel like it, to make another 4 windows. This is going to be your second floor.Note: you could do this by drawing single windows each and every time, but it’s a lot faster this way. Try a 20 story tall building and you’ll see I’m right. Once you get used to this simple routine, you can (and you WILL) use it for a lot more other things too while modeling. You will figure out how easy it is to make a building (or many other things) this way, also, how easy to edit them in seconds just the way you want it. Honestly, I seldom use the snap toggle, but at the begging it surely will help you. Please notice that you can move and change any segments, vertices, or even entire splines within the *whole* spline. Save your work, so if something goes wrong, you don’t have to start all over. That’s a major pain.