Making of Grapes by Raul Fabian, Romania

Texturing

I searched the internet for the picture of grape leaf. I open the picture in Photoshop and extracted just the leaf I needed. After that I played around with some layers. To obtain the autumn look I mixed the leaf layer with some rust metal layers. Here’s the outcome:


The leaf material setup is shown in the following image:



On leaves I applied planar UVW Mapping. The branch and the wood piece are just Vray materials with standard parameters and a map in the diffuse slot. Both of them have Cylindrical UVW Mapping.

The most challenging material was the one for the grapes. I found a fruit texture on internet, something blue, I don’t know exactly what fruit, and I mixed it with a smoke map. Until now everything was easy, the tricky part comes now, the Sub Surface Scattering (SSS). In Vray to obtain the SSS effect, you have to combine Refection, Refraction, Translucency and Fog. After some hours of testing I finally achieved it. Details you can see in the following grape mat image.



Rendering and Global Illumination

For rendering I have used Vray renderer. Anything I have changed is shown in the next image:


I also used VRay Depth of Field (DOF) and VRay environment, with white color and checked override Max’s. More info about Vray renderer can be found here: http://www.vray.info/links.asp?categoryID=3

Rendering time for this scene was 32 hours and 14 minutes.


Post Production

For post production I opened the image in Photoshop and started to paint. I have created several new layers. First I made some retouches here and there. Now comes the cheating. To add some more detail to the SSS grapes I took a close-up picture with grapes. From there I have extracted some details and put them in a new layer in Photoshop and changed the layer type to Multiply.


To add detail this way was much easier than obtain it directly in Max with SSS. Another layer I have created for the Lens Flare effect. One last layer contains just an overall color and a warming filter. That’s it. Now we have the final image.



Something about me

My name is Raul Fabian, I am 23, I grew up in Resita, Romania and now I am a student at Polytechnics University in Timisoara, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. I always enjoyed drawing as a child. Now I am enjoying 3D Studio Max and the digital art.

May the Power of CG with you.