Making Of 'The Old Fox'

Inspiration

Some weeks ago, I was reading about American, English and Norwegian architecture revivals: neo-gothic and neo-classic. I was so impressed by these styles, that I began to do some research using the Internet as well as using some reference pictures from books. After which I came up with some sketches which would be my starting ground for the modelling. So the Old Fox is born.

Modelling

I've poly modelled all the models that I have used in the scene. So let's start from the little house on the left (img 1,2): I made a plane with some segments in the X and Y directions, then moved them by editing vertex, obtaining the desired position of the polygons.

Now using extrude, bridge, chamfer, I've added some boxes for the roof pitches and for the window-sill, I've obtained the model of the house.

The door (img D) is a simple box edited in poly mode. The same for the wood tiles on the roof (img A). The window frame (img C) is an extruded spline adjusted again by editing vertex. The top window (img B) is an extruded spline and two boxes.

Ok, now onto the Old Fox. Again use plane, adjust vertex, extrude, bridge and chamfer, for the entire wall structure. The gutter (img E) is obtained by extruding a spline and modelling the result by moving vertex. The other elements (img F, G and H) are simple box edited with edit poly. The wood beams are boxes with chamfered edges. Very simple.

Adding details: For the rope that is attached to the well's bucket, I've just used a simple combination of tubes, cylinders, boxes and a renderable spline.

I used a chamfered box for the water pump and for the Inn's sign, it was made up of cylinders, a torus and a box.

The dead tree in front of the small house is made by, attaching a lot of basic twigs and scaling and rotating them to get the desired effect.

The houses on the extreme left and the one in the background are made up of a variation of all the parts.

Texturing

This step is fundamental, together with modelling, to obtain the desired look. For the textures I've used 3DTotal's Total Textures CDs. The textures I chose were, some metal, bricks, wood and stone from v1, v3 and v14. I have also used some dirt maps from v5. I've combined the maps in Photoshop using layer opacity, the eraser tool, the clone stamp tool and the healing brush tool.

Here are some examples of what I did.

The same textures I've used to make the respective bump and specular maps. Each object is UVW mapped using the box mode. (except for the well, which I've used cylindrical mapping coordinates).

Lighting

My idea was to have a morning atmosphere, a warm light after a cold night. So to achieve this, I used two lights, a Direct 01 for the ambient light and Direct 02 with volume light effect for sun rays. Here are the settings that I've used.

I've also added a plane, which I have added a tree textures and placed it between the Direct01 and the Old Fox building, this way I can obtained a soft shadow, like some vegetation around the scene.

Rendering

I used Vray 1.49 as a rendering engine. After a lot of tests at low resolution with the default Vray grey material I settled on this settings.

With the colour mapping on a default settings, The rendering time was about 6 hours for a resolution of 1200 x 800....after some post work in Photoshop, here is the final image:

That's all! ;)

You can contact me at: sandro_ghezzani@yahoo.it

Fetching comments...

Post a comment