Making of The Alleyby Roy Stein, London Web: www.roystein.com



This image was created to be used as the front cover of a London based band “Tabloid”- (http://www.myspace.com/tabloiduk)

The briefing was simple – create a typical wintery mood you would find in a deserted London back street, but to keep it non cg-like and personal. I have decided to try and approach this project a bit differently, and to treat the job as a matte painting more than a traditional 3D render I would usually do. I started by collecting some references from the web that suited my direction, and by that helping me decide on a color palette and building shapes.

Once I filled my head with visuals, I dove directly into 3D studio max (version 2009) and started to sketch in some boxes, no detail, just basic structures, trying to find a good relationship of height and scale between them.

Once I had a basic street structure, I created a camera, gave it the Cover resolution ratio (1:1) and refined the lens and FOV values. Once the camera was locked, I added some smaller details such as the drain pipes and some garbage bins along the alley, all very simple geometry.


The next step was to light the scene, and I used an array of Photometric area lights, with varying intensities and colors, all with low sampling shadows, since I wanted a fast render and knew that I will paint on top of this anyway… I gave all the buildings an arch & design grey material with almost no Specular highlights, and gave the floor a glossier Shader since I knew it will be raining and wanted not to have to paint in all the reflections.



I rendered the image in several passes, a beauty, ambient occlusion and reflection, and also rendered black and white masks for all the different objects – one for pipes, one for bins, etc. In Photoshop, I placed all the images I rendered as layers, and copied the masks into different channels, so I can easily select them when needed. The idea I had was to basically “paint” in the textures and finer details, to give it a more illustrative look that I know the band was looking for. I grabbed a lot of textures I collected over time, and bit by bit, matched them to the grey buildings of the render using the transform tools in PS.