The modelling for this image is quite simple because it’s essential made by profile extrusions for skyscrapers and by subtractions for windows.Most complicated parts as the street-lamp were modelled using box modelling.

In my intention illumination has been studied to give to the image a cloudy day aspect. For the study of illumination I started with a model with neutral colors and I used a HDR image with a lot of white and a distant light lightly redish with area shadows.

Textures for ONE WAY and WALL STREET road sign have been taken from internet images as the ones of the flags. Instead, marble, street-lamp, stop road sign and wet spots on the marble textures have been taken from photos taken with my digital camera.

For example the marble is the which one of my stairs: I copied it several times and I meshed it with Photoshop to eliminate the “tile” effect. So I’ve done with the pole of the street lamp, starting with a photo of a smaller pole repeated several times and meshed.

Street-lamp rust and other skyscrapers textures are Cinema 4D procedural shader.

Post-production made in Photoshop where I added out of focus, flags movements, color correction and a light disturb in shadow areas as it happens with a digital camera..

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Software Used:

3ds Max, Mudbox, VRay, Photoshop

Introduction:

Hi everybody, we are Marco Türr and Sebastian Skupch from Germany and we want to give you a short overview of our latest project “The Prometheus”. We are both students in Virtual Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Kaiserslautern. The idea behind “The Prometheus“ was born in the summer of 2008 after we finally finished an interior visualization project for our study and wanted to model something more complex and challenging for our personal portfolio. When a friend told us that he was starting to build a giant-scale RC-model of this nice aircraft and that he had all the blueprints and reference-pictures, we decided to reconstruct The Prometheus in 3D. A few months later at university, we were given a new project where we had to create a composition of a 3D-model and a picture as a backplate and we decided that we want to use this aircraft for that project as well. So let´s start with the modelling process …

Please note: for copyright reasons, we can´t show the blueprints and other documents in this Making Of.

Modelling:

After we collected and sorted the model sheets, we started modelling the hood and fuselage as these parts are the most complex to model. It´s important to create the fuselage as one part and detach the single coverings later in order to guarantee a clean mesh for the reflections etc (Fig.01 – Fig.03).

(fig.01)

(fig.02)

(fig.03)

The next step was to create the wings with ailerons. These parts are quite simple and were extruded out of a shape, representing the profile of the wingtip (Fig.04).

(fig.04)

The tail units were simply extruded shapes which were chamfered. The pivots were set correctly to make it easy to move and animate the rudders later (Fig.05).

(fig.05)

The landing gear and tail wheel can be seen in Fig.06 & Fig.07.

(fig.06)

(fig.07)

The panel was quite detailed, as we always wanted to have the option of making really close-up renderings (Fig.08).

(fig.08)

One of the trickiest parts was surely the propeller. It´s shape was not easy to recreate and we knew that small mistakes could disturb the whole look of the aircraft afterwards. We started by projecting instances of shapes from every view to create the propeller (check out the picture to see what we mean)(Fig.09 & Fig.10).

(fig.09)

(fig.10)

After adding all the remaining parts and details, we decided to actually model the screws instead of just painting them with the maps. This again gave us the possibility of rendering really close views. Here you can see how many screws we had to place all around The Prometheus (Fig.11).

(fig.11)

And finally, here is the finished model with the meshsmooth applied (Fig.12).

(fig.12)

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Caustic effects produced when light rays reflected or refracted by the object surfaces. When the light rays are transporting from refractive surfaces to diffuse surfaces will strictly follow physical rules and cause light rays converging in one spot or diverging. In this 3D Studio Max Tutorial I want to discuss about refractive caustic effect in Vray. Creating a right material for object and setting the light is very important to show caustic effect.

Final Result Preview

Part 1: Create Glass Material

Step 1:

Open Render Setting dialog. In Assign Renderer rollout click on Production button and choose Vray from list. Here the version of Vray is not important.

Step 2:

Open Material Editor. Click on Get Material button and double click on VRayMtl in Material/Map browser. Change the name of this material to Glass_ref.

Step 3:

Change the parameters of Glass_ref material:

• Reflect color = White (R=255 , G=255 , B=255)
• Fresnel reflections = On
• Reflection Subdivs = 10
• Reflection Max Depth = 12
• Refract color = White (R=255 , G=255 , B=255)
• IOR = 1.55
• Refraction Subdivs = 10
• Refraction Max Depth = 12
• Fog Color = Light Gray (R=240 , G=240 , B=240)
• Fog Multiplier = 0.5

Finally in Options rollout check Reflect on back side

As this material is fully transparent we do not need to change Diffuse color however even if you change it, it will not have any affect in final renders. Fresnel option is check to Fresnel Physic law and let it simulate reflection naturally. if you do not check Fresnel option, then you need to change your Reflect color to a very light gray.

Max depth by default is set to 5 for both reflection and refraction. This number determines how many times the light ray can be reflected or refracted. I have sliced my glass vertically to show you how Max depth works. As you can see a ray is reflecting four times because glass object has four layers.

If Max depth be less than 4, then our final result will be very opaque. So to determine Max depth always need to see our scene reflective and refractive surfaces. For this model I chose 12 because later I want to have caustic effect which will take more energy of light. In the below picture I render Glass object once with Max depth of 12 and another time I changed it to 5. You can obviously see how glass object lost detail with Max depth of 3. Pay attention to the rendering time that it didn’t increase much.

I didn’t want to change the Glass color but I wanted to make attenuation of light as it passes through the object. So I give Fog Color a very light gray to let thicker areas become darker than thinner areas.

Under Fog color, you have Fog Multiplier. This field will let you to control the strength of the Fog color. Smaller values reduce the effect of the fog color; let more lights pass through and making the material more transparent. Larger values increase this effect and making the material more opaque. In below picture I have show you the final result with different Fog multiplier values.

Because my object has transparent material and I want it cast transparent shadow, I need to turn On Affect Shadows option. This option only works with V-Ray shadows and lights.

But in my tutorial I didn’t turn Affect shadows option On. The reason is because later I want to apply caustic effect. In Vray when you Turn on caustic effect, Affect shadows will automatically turn off. In fact Affect shadows is just a fake caustic effect.

The last option that I active it is Reflect on back side. When this option is On, reflection for back faces of object also will calculate. This affect includes internal reflections too. in Below picture I have shown the difference in result when Reflect on back is On and Off. as you can see when this option is On, increase the realism but also it take longer time for rendering.

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Click here to view big image

As you can see above, this is the final image. It took 15 mins to achieve this look with a dual Xeon 3.0 and 2 gb ram.

Here is the scene layout in 3dsmax ( I use version 9 )

The main idea for this image was to have soft shadows and realism.. So I used Area Lights, I placed two Area Lights and a Skylight which is not fancy, didnt touch parameters of kylight..(Skylight is needed for Final Gather) Usually, for reflections, HDR images are cool but for this situation HDR is useless..Environment was lit quite enough to compete with HDR lighting or reflections..

Scene scale is one of the most important thing when you work with both area lights and GI, in some situations you have to do some trial & error to catch the mood, I made some trials too.

Below is the Car paint Shader of Mental Ray

I left the walls open behind the camera, so environment color can pass to the scene and reclected on the car body and the rest..I put a gradient ramp on a slot, selected spherical environment mapping and choosed this for Max’s environment..Its allways better to use a gradient ramp to mimic athmosphere..In this case environment color is not seen well on the scene but it helps a lot for the progress..

Here is the most powerful stuff, Exposure Control, its again related to the scene scale and units, there is no standart lighting setup for each scene..Exposure control helps you a lot when you have dark images and fixes the rest if you dont want to play light’s parameters a lot..

I have used default settings for GI and “Hi” preset for the Final Gather..Basic color correction applied in Photoshop for the final image. I hope you enjoyed this small making of stuff..

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Research :

It’s been years since I had the desire to model a cartoon car; I remember spending hours browsing all the images from the 3DTotal gallery looking for inspiration, and each time I laid my eyes on a car I would feel more and more inspired to make my own. That was how I ended up making plans to build a Volkswagen Beetle – also known as “Fusca”, in Brazil.

Concept Art:

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At first, my basic idea was to build a destroyed police car, filled with bullets and guns. But as soon as I modelled the front hood and did a test with Maya’s “mi_car_paint” from Mental Ray, I decided to make a red, curvy and shiny Beetle. I don’t think there is any other car as round and curvy as the VW Beetle; cartoons are all about curves, nothing is straight or square, and so this car was the perfect candidate for this project because every piece of it is rounded.

First I made a drawing of the side view of my car, starting with a sketch of the average shape of the original Beetle. Then I started changing everything that I could, making it even more rounded. I exaggerated the sizes and worked on a stronger, curvier concept.
Modeling:

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Once I was happy with the sketch, I jumped into Maya and started modelling the overall shape using basic Box Modelling techniques, with the help of lots and lots of splines to set up the proportions correctly, because I didn’t have the top or the front view, only the side sketch.

Having these lines as a 3D reference for the overall structure, I started modelling piece by piece using box modelling techniques, taking advantage of Maya’s Smooth Mesh preview.

To use the Smooth Mesh preview feature, just start modelling anything with polygons and then press the 1, 2 and 3 keys to view the low and high smoothed versions on the fly. Once you are happy with the object, you will have to convert the mesh: click on Modify, Convert, and select the option: Smooth Mesh Preview to Polygons.

The low polygon version of the Beetle ended up having a total of 10,819 faces, and a total of 232,000 faces once it was mesh smoothed on level 3.

After I had all the lines adjusted for a perfect idea of proportions and spacing, I started looking at my references and modelling the most important parts of the car, like the door, hood, trunk, front, and structure. The best approach when car modelling is to model separate pieces, just like it is done in a real factory, so you can achieve nice dents between pieces. Since this was a cartoony version of the Beetle, I decided to exaggerate the dents.

Once everything looked “right”, I started modelling all the accessories and every little piece, like the tyres, windows, rubbers, head lights, turn lights, wind shields, door handles, plates, antenna and so on.

Texturing :

The red shader wasn’t too difficult to approach; I used the Mental Ray “mi_car_paint” node. To create one, just open the Hypershade, go to create, mental ray materials, and select: “mi_car_paint_phen”.

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