Making of Arcadia by Benjamin Letigeb, Italy



Texturing

Once I was satisfied with scene illumination it was time to start working on textures - the easiest but most time consuming part if you ask me. I will not go into details here because you can find many good tutorials that explain this process step by step. The textures for Arcadia were based on high resolution images of my own. I added dirt, scratches and small surfaces details in Photoshop. When I was finished with one, I saved the diffuse map as bump map - same image but inverted, desaturated and with higher contrast. In 3ds Max I put my maps together. I used predominantly Max standard materials, sometimes VRay materials when I tried to achieve subtil reflections. The sand material is a procedural map mix (noise, gradient, falloff and more noise). That's it, nothing special :) In the end every part of the scene was rendered with VRay 1.09 and saved in a format where I could bind in the alpha channel (TIFF, TGA and so on) I used standard VRay render settings, no VRay lights, no HDRI, only the quick and high quality Global Illumination.


Post- Production

I say always that a pure render out of any 3d software is like a un-cut diamond :) With some retouches in your favorite painting or compositing program you can enhance the quality of your work enormously. If you know what you can achieve in postproduction, you can decide early on what you have to do during the 3d process. I opened my four renders in Photoshop and, with help of the alpha channels; I put them together in a new file. The several layers give me the opportunity to work separately on the jet, the airplane and the columned hall. As you can see below, without any improvements the whole scene looks terrible; low contrast, watery colors... In fact it's not even clear from which direction the light is coming.