Heritage - Tutorials

Heritage


	It took me two months of summer time to complete my latest work, called ‘Heritage’. I spent a lot of time in the evenings and nights with quite big pauses during the summer for a vacation and work. I tried to achieve lighting for the time a bit after sunset when the intensity of the sky is still strong but shadows are no longer sharp, instead soft and diffuse. I just love the old broken dark atmosphere with a bit of romance inside. The whole of ‘Heritage’ was done in 3ds Max 8 and rendered in VRay. The whole scene was modeled and rendered as geometry, with displacement, translucency and reflections. Rendering this scene took a lot of time, something like 60 hours on my laptop in 2K resolution. I wanted to have it all in 3D and afterwards, I'll try to optimize it for animation by replacing as many objects as possible with pre-rendered mattes.

The images here are both from my own photographic research and also from the many, many sites on the web. Their placement and reference use should be self-evident.

For me modeling is really something very relaxing. I use polygonal modeling in 3ds Max using Editable poly and few standard modifiers like Symmetry, Turbosmooth, Bend, Twist, Path Follow, Taper etc. There is nothing special on modeling I used on Heritage that was not already described in 3ds Max user reference. Basically it is nothing more than Editable poly with its functions like connect, weld, cut, extrude, champfer etc. Again all of these functions are described in the user reference of 3ds Max. If you want to be a fast and good modeller, you need to know your modeling tools as best as possible, so take the time to read about it and try it out. Don't be lazy. Do something for yourself instead of asking primitive questions in forums around the world. It's better for you and better for moderators. I also want to mention that for the grass modeling, I used the script called advanced painter by Herman Saksono upgraded by my friend and colleague Federico Ghirardini. You can find the original script on scriptspot.com. The next handy stuff I used is plug-in called As you can see, all the wire-frames are flipped horizontally. I decided to flip the image at the end to attract more attention to the sunset to underline atmosphere and mood of the image.

For texturing I used textures from my personal library, pictures I took and lot of textures are from www.environment-textures.com. This is the biggest environment textures and references library I know and it is still growing. For UV's I used planar, box or cylindrical mapping almost everywhere. I always unwrap only those parts which are really asking for it. In this case it was only concrete part of transmission tower in the foreground. For water bump I used mix of few procedural maps as shown on the picture. Since I used V-ray for this image I used VrayMtl as base shader. There is a lot of displacement which is just great in V-ray.

For smokes on the power plant I used pre-rendered images. I made them with ParticleFlow and Afterburn and then I projected them on planes.

As renderer I used VRay. For lighting I used a VRay dome light for skylight and one directional light for sunlight. I didn't use Global illumination this time. It should be a quite contrasted image and therefore the bounced light was not that necessary. The image was rendered to 2K resolution with Mitchell-Netravali anti-aliasing filter to make it a bit sharper. It was quite hell to render it. It took something like 60 hours on my laptop (a Centrino Duo processor with 2Gb of RAM). Of course there are a lot of possibilities to optimize the render time. More than half of the image can be just a matte painting. Despite all of this, I still think that I spent the time well while working on it and playing with it and after all to finish it mainly in 3D. The image is for relaxation and is not a big production job with tight deadlines so I took my time to make it. In a few months perhaps I'd like to optimise it and create a short movie. I hope it will be done one day.

For post production I used Fusion 5. On the pictures below you can see short and simple flow and passes I used. There are two rectangle masks for masking the area of highlights and area of fog. Note that in the fog pass there is still reflection on the water. For this pass I used black material for all objects except the water which has the same material as it had in the render pass. From the coloring point of view I decided to use a green/yellow tinting.

Marek Denko finished high school in Banska Stiavnica and went to the Faculty of Civil Engineering at Brno University of Technology, studying civil engineering. Last year, he ended up going to Italy to work for Dario Picciau at 263 Films, on the 'Dear Anne' movie. He's still there. His work is also featured in Ballistic Publishing's EXOTIQUE and ELEMENTAL 2.
Related links: Marek’s site 263films S.p.a Showreel [direct link] Dear Anne

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Added on: 2007-05-15