ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tiziano Fioriti was born May 6th, 1986 in a small town in Central Italy. After attending the senior high school specializing in science education in Gualdo Tadino (Umbria, Italy) he went to the Faculty of Industrial Design at Florence University; however all he knows about Computer Graphics is rigorously self-taught. See more: http://www.tizianofioriti.com

INTRODUCTION

When I went to France on April 2005 on my high school trip, I bought different postcards to send them to my family and friends. Accidentally I forgot to post one of them so I brought it home. It represented the Cafe de Flore of Paris, the famous café of french existentialists and artists. I liked a lot and so I decided to realize it with computer graphics techniques and instruments.

I just wanna say “thanks” to my old pc: a Pentium 4 processor with a Radeon 9800pro and only 512 mb ram memory. For the realization I used 3ds max 7 and Vray Advanced 1.46. A great post-production process was possible with a Wacom Graphic Tablet. I have Intuos 2 A4 format.

MODELING

When you decide to realize an image like this, you have to know that the modeling part is the simplest.

All the objects of the scene are modelled in Max with polygonal instruments. The coffee mug, the saucers, the glasses and the fluids were created with lathe tool and then converted to editable polys for texturing. The eggs are simple geospheres with a lot of subdivisions.

The woman drawing is a simple editable spline converted to editable polys and then distorted with FFD 4x4x4 modifier. The table is a primitive cilinder converted and modified as editable polys

TEXTURING

The scene is embeded in various complex vray materials. We’ll begin from the simplest.My drawing is as diffuse and a texture created in Photoshop as bump (with value of 80).The coffee mug has a texture created in Photoshop (simulating porcelain) as diffuse, a clear gray color (R211, G211, B211) in Reflect slot and fresnel reflection activated.

The pills are a Multi/Sub-Object material with two Vray embedded materials ;both have Reflect slot with a gray near white color (R228, G228, B228) and fresnel reflection activated.

The egg material has a texture created in Photoshop in diffuse channel, a dark gray (R59, G59, B59) in reflect slot (FR activated) and refl.glossiness at 0,7.

The water and the glass have very similar materials (see image below for Milk material too) except for IOR value; water has 1,335 while glass has 1,606.

The teapot has a chromed material; diffuse at black, reflect slot at R228, G228, B228, fresnel reflection activated and max depth of reflection at 10.

DEAD CITY

“Dead City” is one of the fourteen locations which I’m preparing for my music clip. I don’t want to say too much about the story, because some things can change (there’s still a lot of work to do) and – what is more important – I might kill the punchline. Anyway, In this scene I wanted to show abandoned city – dirty, dusty, sun-baked – one can say: without any signs of life, but simultaneously carring hope that life (or life forms) can exist in most adverse conditions, most unexpected place and it resurrect very quickly.

PHOTOS AND WORKFLOW

Most often the workflow looks like this: sketch, modeling, texturing, lightning, rendering, post-production. But I found out long time ago that I’m not a painter and I’ll never be able to reach level of realism that nature presents. I could make 100 layers in Photoshop with dirt, rust, cracks,finally I added a few for almost every texture but nature will be better in that area. So, that’s why I decided to make real photos first and than – based on prepared textures – start to modeling. I borrow digital camera (canon 400d), took my own, old, dusty analog camera (Revueflex SD1) and I started to looking for interesting places to take photos. With help Of my sister I took about 1200 digital photos and about 360 analog photos. Rusty cars, ruins, broken roofs and walls, old trains – I photographed everything that can be usefull in making the clip.

TEXTURE MAKING

There were 2 problems with photos. The first one: When people saw a man who is running across the streets and taking photos of every building they started to think, that I’m a thief or some kind of cryminalist – so, not everytime I could take photo at right angle and position – because of that there was a problem with correct perspective on photos. The second: There was a lot of unwanted elements on pictures – like antennas, cars, flowers, cables, etc. I run photoshop and started to retouching. Below you can find example of work with one of the buildings.

MODELING

When textures were ready I started to model buildings. Huge advantage of this style of work is that you have all dimensions, distances, etc. right on the picture. You don’t need to worry if “that window” is 160 or 180 cm height, or is “this tier” have 250, 293, or 310 cm… All models (except plants) were made in XSI.

STREETCAR

Streetcar – like the one in my scene – has move across my born town (they weren’t so dirty and rusty of course). I thought that placing this object in my scene will increse mystery mood. Left on a crossroads, with open doors, overgrown by grass and shrubs… Strange. People have to abandoned this place really quickly… When I was creating this streetcar I was using traditional workflow: first I founded reference photos, than I modeled it, textured and placed it in the scene. Textures for streetcar were made without any “photo base”. I mixed and painted several layers of dirt and rust and I added ambient occlusion layer (baked before).

PLANTS

Making vegetation was the hardest part of the work. Not because I did’t know how to do it, but because I want to keep rendering times as low as possible and – simultaneously – freedom of camera movement – that’s why I didn’t want to use billboards. I’m just not sure what the final camera movement will be. Finally I used X-FROG for trees and shrubs, “Ivy generator” for Ivys and ingenious plug-in “DPIT Nature Spirit” for grass and dry leaves. DPIT is a plug-in which gives possibility to “paint” (clone) plants and other objects on surfaces (by mouse or pen – which I used for dry leaves) or use bitmaps for this task (which I used for grass). Textures for plants were taken from XFROG.

LINEAR WORKFLOW

When I started to make renderings with GI (some time ago), I was trying to find everything about it in the internet. And I found several articles about linear workflow. If you are interested in details, please look at the internet – there’s a lot of materials on this topic. In the brief, the whole thing is about gamma. Monitor displays pictures with gamma 2,2 (1,8 for MAC), but the render engine works in linear scale (gamma=1,0). All you have to do to work in LWF is that you should give your renderer pictures and colors in linear scale. You can do that by adding gamma correction with parameter 0,455 (this means 1/2,2 – for PC). There’s a lot of advantges when using LWF: light goes deeper in the scene, rendering is natural and physically correct, you don’t have to worry abour color mapping. Of course you don’t have to use LWF (you can use color mapping, desaturation, contrast, etc.), but for me it is the best and the easiest way to make correct renderings.

Below – quick comparison:
In every rendering I used the same materials and render settings. No lights (one of the sphere is illuminating).

on the left – linear workflow (Color mapping – linear multiply, Dark mult.: 1, Bright mult.: 1, Gamma: 2,2)
in the middle – no linear workflow (Color mapping – lHSV Exponential, Dark mult.: 3, Bright mult.: 3, Gamma: 1) (too dark)
on the right – no linear workflow (Color mapping – llinear multiply, Dark mult.: 1, Bright mult.: 1, Gamma: 2,2) (light but colors are washed out)

LFW settings

LIGHTNING AND RENDERING

I really don’t know how this shot (it will last about 10 or maybe 20 seconds) will look between previous and next one, that’s why I decided to make very natural, well-lighted rendering – without any mood. The reason is that I want to have a lot of posibilities when editing this final image. I can brighten it up or darken it down, I can make this picture to look greenish or leave it as it is – in brown shade. In that scene I used only one light – physical sun and physical sky. (For rendering I used Cinema4D and V-Ray).

render settings

COMPOSITING AND COLOR CORRECTION

As I said before I want this scene to look dirty, dusty, sun-baked. I had to use color correction. I give to this picture “caffe-cocoa” shade, I made the light and dark glow also, I “changed” the sky and… that’s all.

SUMMING-UP

Thank you for reading this making-of. I hope you like it. Good luck in CG world.

SHOWCASE

MODELING

LIGHTNING

RENDER SETTINGS