Making Of - it comes a time of death.
Hi,
my name is Radoslav Zilinsky and my internet nickname is radoxist. In this article, I would like to present you a 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 a closer attention to some detials which I find interesting.
One of the most important things for me is, to have a good foundation on which I can base my image. As an inspiration could serve a photo, nice picture or my 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 step during the creation was 1.camera placement 2.modeling of basic compositon(mass) 3.scene lightning. I find it very important to have this three steps at the begining. It is something like making foundations 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 dont care how the model looks when I'm rotating it 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 the 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 is 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 good, especially in combination with obejct isolation(alt+Q). As a result, material testing was very fast. As an illustration, I rendered three pictures(tests). All of them were done in 4-5 minutes( and already in 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.
As for the material tests,in most of the cases I have used camera view as I have already mentioned before.
Now lets talk about the individual objects in the scene.
1. SURFACE
Here I would like to tell you how I proceeded in creation of the texture for surface and show you this texture as well. Whole diffuse texture was done from 5 different textures such as grass, earth, leaves atc. 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 have then 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 and than it was adjusted with brightnes/contrast. On the next picture you can see a little piece of this texture. The texture itself has 8000x8000pix resolution.
2. GRASS
For this I recommend my Grass tutorial There are only two diferences. The first one 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 which is because it wasn't such a large area and I wanted to have it in the exact position as I wished.
3. SMALL TREE ON THE RIGHT
Here I found interesting the way how I placed leaves on this tree (I want to thank bontakun, who helped me with this). 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. Finaly make a particle flow exactly the way as it is on the next picture. You will achieve, that all leaves will be placed on selected faces of "small tree on the right" and they will be perpendicular to them.
3.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. Here it's very important to have a good reference. One of my references is on the next picture.
4.BIG TREE
I wanted this main tree to be really nice, and therefore I have paid it most of my attention. The first thing I have done was that I took a pencil and drew the tree in a way I liked it. Than I scanned this picture, took it to max on plane object and put it on the place of the tree. This sketch worked as a blueprint for me - but not for the front and side view, but 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.
hile creating the texture, I have at first spent few hours searching for interesting shots and nice details of trees, which I could use for the texture. By doing this I found very nice textures, from 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 very good picture from which I can paint the texture for the whole tree. Here are the textures also with unwrap.
Here I would like to tell you how I made the displacement map, which I wanted to add as a liane structure to the tree. As it was quite dificult to draw it in the photoshop, I did it in the other way and I simly modeled it from 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 stregths. You can see something similar on the next picture.
Further on, I transformed this model into 2d displacement map. I have done it by rendering a z-depth map from top view to this object. So it became a map which I have 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 causing 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 lead 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, I also spent some time searching on the internet for nice skies and mountains. The final background is a composition of 5 different pictures. There was just added a volume light and color correction in the postproduction and final picture was done:) 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 and just to say hallo:)
Radoslav Zilinsky "radoxist"
