Making of Rage over Babylon by Ziv Qual, Israel


The props –

Like I said earlier, this is a massive scene, and in order to keeps it interesting and not repetitive, I needed to make a very wide range of objects, buildings, trees, people and animals. I am not going to cover every single thing I modeled, just a few interesting points –

* I've made 9 different variations to the bricks that make the well so that even the bricks won't look the same.

* Before scattering all the flags, I've prepared a bend and twist modifiers to them so that no 2 flags will look the same, I’ve also made allot of actual symbols that represents the different cultures.

* The temple is modeled pretty much the same way as the tower. It was placed right in front of the tower to enhance the Sense of scale - notice that it is four stories tall and yet it doesn't reach the height of one level of the tower.

* I've made variations in the fire parameters of each torch, and I also changed the color and intensity of the lights they emit.

* I gave all the characters a basic rig so that I could pose each one differently.

* As I already mentioned, the vases have over 100 combinations. The mapping is the same in all the vases so that each vase model can go with 10 different textures and with different stretching (non uniform scale).




The materials –

I've been asked allot about the materials. Evan though I used mental ray, the materials are actually pretty Basic. Almost all the objects in this scene have the max's standard Multi-layer material. I like to use the multi-layer shader simply because it gives me control over the diffuse LEVEL (not color) and because it gives great control over the specular. Most of the objects have matching color maps, diffuse level maps, specular maps, and bump maps. I often used mix maps with masks with map channel 2 (and sometimes 3) so that I could easily change the mapping of the masks differently for duplicated objects to create variations easily.