Making of: Restaurant in Bordeaux

Making of: Restaurant in Bordeaux

Pawel Podwojewski shows us how he done the project: Restaurant in Bordeaux by using Autodesk 3ds Max, Vray, and Adobe Photoshop.

This scene is a part of a more complex project that consist of three buildings. I tried to keep the poly count as low as possible. After the camera position was set I have added more details on the foreground.


Terrain:
The idea for the terrain was very simple - wooden chips in the main area and some grass to get the scene more alive. I have used a bitmap from the www.cgtextures.com site for chips creation. I have changed the diffuse map into greyscale and pumped up the contrast with curves in order to get a proper displacement map.

Once I have done that, I have applied the v ray displacement modifier to a simple plane surface which was representing my terrain.


Grass:
For this scene I have prepared some new grass and wheat models. I have used the basic eidt poly techinques to achive the final effect. Below you can see the rough geometry. I started with a single strund, one leaf and some seeds. I placed them by hand and multiplied using the Advanced Painter script developed by Herman Saksono. Each strund has a very simple texture that I have painted using photos as refernece. When few small groups of strunds were ready I have converted them into editable poly and attached into one object and in the end I have exported all geometry into v ray proxy. The proxies are represented through green and orange boxes visible in the scene screenshots.


Lighting:
Working on the light in dusk and night scenes is one of the most exciting elements in the whole creation process. This time I have used many v ray sphere lights to lit the interior and also photometric lights with ies distribution to simulate halogen bulbs. The Enviroment lighting consist of two basic sources.
Ambient light which is the v ray sky combined with Dome light and a direct light. The v ray sky map is not used directly though. To lit the scene and gain proper GI I have used a v ray dome light with the v ray sky map as texture. The v ray sky map has been cliped to a target direct standard light in order to receive a nice ramp on it. In fact the direct light(standard) was turned of at all times. I know this might be confusing but in this particular scene the described setup worked in the most efficient way including time and quality of rendering
Lights position from Camera


Lights setting: Most of the lights inside the building have a bit orange color to achieve a warm feeling of the place.


Rendering Setting:



Postproduction 
Raw rendering

Total lighting

Z depth

Reflection


Postproduction in this case was pretty simple. The original rendering is a bit washed out of colors and contrast. To fix this I have played with curves and contrast. Also I have used exposure control with some blue and orange tint and mixed the channels. Using the reflection filter channel I was able to control the reflections. The outside lamps have some glow. To achieve this effect I used the glow filter with eliptic masks with fether to blend them nice. Also a color correction was aplied.

It is also nice to add a star filter fan. To do this we can use the line shape. Draw a line with the witdh that will fit to your composition in my case 2px.
Once you have done that rasterize the layer and aply to it a gradient with orange color, feather the sharp egdges and adjust the position and rotation. To blend it better with the picture you can decrease the opacity level. Work with different width of stripes to gain a more realistic result.

Final Image: