Making of Arcadia by Benjamin Letigeb, Italy



Introduction

The Arcadia project was a personal challenge. I tried to use all the techniques that I have learned over the last few months by myself. By the way I'm interested in the history of art and I always try to learn as much as I can from the great masters of last centuries (Caravaggio, Possin, Casper David Friedrich and so on) Maybe from there comes the slight 2d/painting touch of the final image? It's crazy that they were able to create such amazing artwork without any dual processor, 3GB RAM workstation and two 21 inch displays :) My first inspiration was like a brainwave. I saw a picture of some old columns and five minutes later I had my first poor sketch on a piece of paper; as you know, it's important that you draw all the good ideas that come into your mind, no matter how good you can draw! After intensive sketching I came up with a desert columned hall, a crashed airplane and a divine light in the background. In my mind I sub-divided the whole scene into a foreground that shows a wreck (here I put the airplane and the jet); the space in the middle of the picture represent a hopeful presence (this is where you can see the two travelers); and finally an uncertain future? the shining background. But enough now with this scary explanations and the art stuff :) Let's have a look at the technical part.


Modeling and Composition

In this tutorial I will not go into step by step details and I assume that you are familiar with the basics of 3ds Max, Vray and Photoshop. All right, let's get started with one of the trickiest part in the whole process. Not everything that works on paper, works in 3d space, too. So in the beginning I assembled my scene with simple boxes, took the camera in the right position and played around with the size of main objects and the distance between them. The challenge here was to bring the objects together without using a tele ? objective and losing therefore the 3d effect. When I was satisfied with the result I split up the scene into four areas: the jet in the foreground, the airplane, the first four columns and the background. Then I saved them in different files. I will render the layers separately and put them together in Photoshop afterward. This saves memory, renders time and allows me to set up different light settings for each area without affecting other parts in the scene. With a lot of research material on my desk, I created the basic shapes of the airplane wreckage and worked out the important details. All parts of this image were modeled as editable poly objects with some modifications on top and never ending playing with poly tools like extrude, bevel cut and so on. Nothing special, all this functions are well described in 3ds Max user references. Finally I ended up with a almost "low poly" scene; only 300.000 faces (mesh smooth included).




Lighting

Basically I work on lighting before I start to place my textures in the scene. This method gives me more control over the objects behavior and shows me where later textures need more attention and which parts can be found in dark areas. For the basic light setup I put together the most important objects in one file (as you can remember I'd split up the scene into four 3ds Max files to accelerate the modeling process). A huge sphere with inverted polygons encloses the whole landscape. I removed some faces on top of it, so the inside is not totally dark when turning on VRay environment light res. VRay skylight. I ended up with an illuminated corridor between an almost pitch black column hall. Two big backlights, or so called rim or hair lights worked as key lights. A hand full fill-lights soften the shadows cast by the key lights and add some additional illumination. One last important installation was the "Deflector Lights". As you can see on the side view image, I put them in front of the hall over the jet. In this case a deflector light is nothing else than a simple 3d object, a box or a plane with a self illuminated material, to obtain bounced light. If you need a blue tone in your scene, use a blue material or bitmap, if you need red, use a reddish one. I'm sure there exist better methods than that, but with VRay Global Illumination and some fine tuning it works very well. Finally I imported this basic light setup into all four files and started adding additional spots and deflectors. If your computer is too slow to work on complex geometry it's far better to split the scene up than muddle along on one huge piece :)