Making of Rage over Babylon by Ziv Qual, Israel


Lighting and Rendering

First of all, I'm going to talk about the biggest challenge I've had to face when I worked on this image - rendering it. Right at the planning stage, I knew I am going for way more details than what my computer can render at once, that meant I had to plan where to break the composition into pieces and render each piece separately. It meant I had to first prepare everything in the viewport and at a certain point decide that the camera angle and general lighting setup are final. After I did that, I've started working on two main parts separately. in the viewport - the tower and the city, both parts had to have the same "connection point" which was the first 2 floors of the tower. Besides some effect passes, the tower was pretty much rendered at once, but the city was more complex than that, it had too many polygons and textures to be rendered at once so it was rendered in pieces as well - the city, the market, the ocean, trees and effects. It was quite nice to put everything together and see that things actually worked after I finished rendering all the pieces. The renders crashed allot because of memory run outs and it was a relief when it worked out because I was on a tight deadline. When I had all the geometry rendered, I started rendering a few different passes to enhance the image at the compositing stage. The main passes I rendered were occlusion (you can see here how I work with an occlusion pass) for the city and the tower and dust for the city and the tower. To make the dust pass, I gave all the objects a matte/shadow material, added several volume fog effects and added allot of gizmos in the scene, some for general dust in the air and even some for local dust below people's feet.



When I rendered, I didn't really use any of MR's fancy features. To light the scene, I mainly used MR's Area lights because they give excellent soft shadows and work well for large scenes. I used 2 main lights from the left and right to set the warm / cold contrast and about 5 fill lights with variation in area size, color and intensity.



Compositing and Painting

Photoshop took a major role in this artwork, this part covers it. The first step was obviously to put all the geometry renders together, flatten the layers and add the effects layers. Once I did it, I had a better view on the entire composition and I could start doing the final color correction. This is something I do with every artwork I make, I start with levels or curves and then I go through color balance to make the general adjustments. After that, I like to use selective color. I like selective color because it gives control over every color separately. And allows to make some changes to a smaller range of colors without changing others. Another trick I like to use often, is to add another layer on top of everything and paint the general colors I want in each part of the image, then set it to soft-light and lower it's opacity. This is usually among the last tweaks I do to an artwork.

There's quite a bit of paint over work in this piece. The main things I painted over the renders were additions to the skies, the raging lightning effects, the birds and the additional cracks on the tower. I did the paint overs using edited photos and custom brushes. Ultimately, the skies needed to justify the lighting, being cold on the left and warm on the right which also symbolizes the two sides of god. The additional cracks that were added are meant to suggest that the tower is just about to crumble into a bit pile of bricks and dust, same goes for the birds that fly away to the warmer side.



This concludes my coverage of this project. I would like to thank all the gr8 M8's over at the forums who supported me in those two months of free-time working on this (you can check out the WIP thread over at CGSociety). The hard work sure paid off, besides the CGS grand prize, this artwork has also been on the cover of CADESIGENR and PIXEL magazines, It was selected to be shortlisted on 2006's CGOVERDRIVE, and won rank one in animago among other things.

Related Links

Ziv Qual Website - www.zivcg.com

Ziv Qual Interview - Click Here