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3D Modeling Techniques > The Making of - It Comes a Time of Death (Posted By: mayafishing)
:: Post Date: 2007-10-11 22:04:26 [Post Comment] [Post Articles]

The Making of "It Comes a Time of Death"

Application Used: Autodesk 3dsmax

Author: Radoslav "radoxist" Zilinsky

Contact: rado83@gmail.com

Author Website:http://www.radoxist.com/

INTRODUCTION

[Click for large image]

Hi, my name is Radoslav Zilinsky and my Internet nickname is radoxist. In this article, I would like to present to you the process of making my picture "It comes a time of death".

I'm going to tell you how I proceeded with the creation, modeling, texturing and composition. I will also pay closer attention to some details that I've found interesting.

One of the most important things for me, is to have a good foundation on which I can base my image. What can serve as inspiration could be a photo, nice picture or your own sketch. In this case, I was inspired by a small cover picture from one of the RUNELORDS series book.

So let's begin with the creation of the picture. My very first steps during creation were :

1. Camera placement

2. Modeling of basic compositon(mass)

3. Scene lightning

I found it very important to have these three steps at the beginning. It is something like setting the foundation for a scene. It is important because everything that follows, will be affected by lightning and camera placement. It basically means that from now on, I can model and design materials for exact camera view and lightning. At this phase, I don't care how the model looks when I'm rotating in the viewport, but I put more emphasis on how it looks from my camera view. The same applies to material design. Now it's time to show you how the picture looks in the first phase.

As you can see, the mass and objects are only roughly modeled, but they are good enough to set 80% of the final lighting. Basically, there are three lights in the scene - on the right side there is one small rectangular light with orange color and higher intesity and another much bigger light with blue color and lower intensity, on the left. The third skydome light of red color and lower intensity is oriented from right to left and its purpose is to add an extra color variation to the picture. From now on, I will not move the camera at all.

At this point, I would like to talk about the chosen renderer and the method of rendering.

As for the rendering, I have used VRay renderer and as a method, progessive path tracing(PPT), which was ideal for this picture. The reason for this is that in the scene there are many objects with VRay displacement, and this method handles them very well, especially in combination with object isolation(alt+Q). As a result, material testing was very fast.

As an illustration, I rendered three pictures(tests). All of them were done between 4-5 minutes( and already within the first minute I could see most of the details),which is a very good result especially when talking about rocks and trees - taking into consieration their detailed displacement. The rendering with "Normal" VRay GI method(other than PPT), for example IRR + light cache, would take much more time than PPT. Here are the above mentioned test pictures.

So we have set the basics of the picture and from now on I will describe the phase in which I have started to substitute objects for final models. For the latter I have done unwrap and made materials right away. I have split everything nicely into layers - great thing, especially if you have a shortcut (I have shift+space), which helps you to open and close it.v

As for the material tests,in most cases I have used the camera view as already mentioned previously.

Now let's talk about the individual objects in the scene.

Surface

Here I would like to tell you how I proceeded in the creation of the texture for my surface, and I will show this texture as well. The whole diffuse texture was done from 5 different textures such as grass, earth, leaves, etc. I loaded them into Photoshop and drew the whole texture mainly with clone stamp, dodge and burn tools and with different type of brushes and adjustments. From this diffuse texture, I made a displacement texture by desaturating it and by using burn and dogde tools. I have also used different selections from diffuse texture made with color range, which was then adjusted with brightness/contrast.

On the next picture you can see a little piece of this texture. The texture itself has 8000x8000pix resolution.

[Click for large image]

Grass

For this I recommend my tutorial here. http://67.15.36.49/team/Tutorials/grass_tut/grass_tut.asp

There are only two diferences, the first is that I used two kinds of textures for grass.

I put them together from CD no. 10 from the 3DTotal texture collection. The second difference is that it was not deleted with texture, but by hand for the reason that it wasn't such a large area and I wanted to have it in an exact position.

Small Tree on the Right

Here, I found it interesting the manner in which I placed leaves on this tree (I want to thank bontakun, who helped me with this). The procedure is that you make one leaf and then place a point helper at the bottom of its stem and link it to the leaf. Finally make a particle flow exactly the way seen on the next picture. All your leaves will be placed on selected faces of "small tree on the right" and they will be perpendicular to them.

King(cloth)

At the beginning, I made this cloth only with diffuse and bump map, but fortunately, my friend Marek Denko persuaded me to model the whole cloth - for which I want to thank him.

It's very important to have a good reference here. One of my references is on the picture below.

[Click for large image]

Big Tree

I wanted this main tree to be really nice, and therefore I have paid most of my attention to it. The first thing I did was take a pencil and draw the tree in a way which I liked. Then I scanned this picture, took it to max on a plane object and put it in the place of the tree. This sketch worked as a blueprint for me - but not for the front and side view, only for the camera view! Generally speaking, I modeled this tree so that it looked like the tree on the sketch. During the modeling I used two viewports - perspective and camera view.

[Click for large image]

While creating the texture, I first spent a few hours searching for interesting shots and nice details of trees that I could use for the texture. By doing so, I found very nice textures, of which I chose the most beautiful one.

As you can see there are two kinds of moss and two kinds of bark. To put it in a more simple way, it is a very good picture and one which I can utilize for painting the texture of the entire tree. Here are the textures also with unwrap.

[Click for large image]

Here I would like to tell you how I made the displacement map, which I wanted to add as vine structure to the tree. As it was quite difficult to draw in Photoshop, I did it another way where I simply modeled it from the plane object with high number of faces by using paint deformation in editable poly. I did it three times on three different planes with different brush sizes and strengths. You can see something similar on the next picture.

Further more, I transformed this model into a 2D displacement map. I did it by rendering a z-depth map from top view to this object, so it became a map which I then used to displace some parts of the tree. Here is rendered z-depth map.

I made the long leaves with standard max hair and fur which was giving me a headache I have redone them 4 times until I was fully satisfied. The small leaves were done with the same method as the small tree on the right.

When it was nearly finished, I rendered it out and connected it in Photoshop. This was just to check the compositon again. After I checked it I decided, that it would be cool to have some darker bushes in the forground to draw the viewer's eye. So I drew the shape directly on the picture in PS and then modeled the bushes from this. The last step was the creation of background and postproduction.

Making the Background

Making the background, I also spent some time searching the Internet for nice skies and mountains. The final background is a composition of five different pictures. There was just an added volume light and color correction in the postproduction and final image was done

[Click for large image]

Conclusion

I hope that this "short" making of was helpful to you and you learned something. I'm really looking forward to see some feedback, so don't hesitate to write me, if you have any question or just to say hello.

Comments: (Currently there are 9 comments.)
- [Anonymous]Tan ( 2008-04-25 15:53:25 ) [Post Comments]
- I'd like anything
- [Anonymous]kanwal ( 2008-03-06 23:26:49 ) [Post Comments]
- it is just simply awesome ...but i think i cant do this ..u are amazing..
- [Anonymous]ahmed ( 2008-01-05 09:48:57 ) [Post Comments]
- thes good
- [Anonymous]cacboon ( 2007-11-27 19:14:40 ) [Post Comments]
- awsome mate
  and very simple and easy tutoril
- [Anonymous]Milkman ( 2007-11-27 01:47:08 ) [Post Comments]
- Start from downloading a good program. I would recomend you 3ds max.
  P.S. My 1 program was Maya, but Maya's tutorials are not as good as 3ds max's.
- [Anonymous]komal ( 2007-11-14 20:06:42 ) [Post Comments]
- very nice work.Thanks for explaining the process in such a simple manner which was appearing very complicated otherwise.
  
  :)
- [Anonymous]melas ( 2007-11-08 21:36:26 ) [Post Comments]
- your creation is great but i would like you to tell more details about how you make the bed what did u use......!
  thank u
- [Anonymous]jael ( 2007-10-18 06:59:08 ) [Post Comments]
- nice tutorial and very good work :)
  interesting and helpful, thx ;)
- [Anonymous]DiGiTAL ( 2007-10-16 08:11:40 ) [Post Comments]
- Its really good work ... i want to become a designer ... and i dont know how to begin my way ...

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