Texturing - I think texturing was the most interesting part of production. I want to create really complex realistic looking textures. I used a lot of textures from mainly from cgtextures.com and from my own photo library. I paid most attention to textures which take most space in render. My final resolution was about 3000px so I must prepared suitable textures. Texture size should be two times bigger than its space in render. I tried to adjust resolution for almost all of my textures with my sample mapping reference (made by loocas duber - http://www.duber.cz/dump/uv_map_reference.jpg). If reference was sharp in render, resolution was right so I start to create final texture. In pictures you can see examples of some interesting textures.
I used almost same technique, some base texture of surface, mostly desaturated or with very low saturation, then I was adding lot of other layers to achieve some irregularity, these textures maybe of little different color. After creation of some surface I add details and lot of dirt, because buildings are quite old. Finally I add color layer with some suitable blending mode and adjust levels etc. When I’m satisfied then I create other maps for material of the object, especially bump maps. I used finalRender R2 for rendering all materials and those are based on fR-Advanced material. Materials in scene are really really simple, nothing complex.
This is my first project where I tried to use NodeJoe plugin. It’s awesome upgrade for materials in max. With NodeJoe, it’s really easy to create complex materials and mainly it helps to orient in maps of our material. In picture you can see tree of one most complex material used for cubes on pavement. I must point out that I’m using Color correct map, which is coming with finalRender, it allows you to control a lot of parameters of map directly in max such as brightness, contrast, RGB values or HSV etc.
Lighting and Rendering - Lighting was very simple. As sunlight I used finalRender RecLight. The color was light orange, because I want to achieve warm sunset mood. Then I adjusted size of light, it caused little more blurred shadow. I also used skylight with physical sky and GI. For nice shadow from tree I used plane with opacity map. That’s all about lighting, simple as I said. More interesting part was rendering, I used pretty same technique as Tim Jones on DVD series about Environment creation from Gnomon Workshop (http://thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/tjo01.html).
I rendered background houses and the rest alone. I’ll explain my passes. Main was keylight, there was skylight and GI turned off and RecLight has a bit bigger multiplier, about 2. All passes were saved in 32bits with alpha. This is important; when you save in 32bits you can later adjust intensities of light, colors etc in large scale without damaging image. Then I rendered only ambient, it was skylight and GI, last pass was fog, with this I created little mood and fog for background. I rendered whole image with all the lights together and it took about one and half hour in 1000x863. Hardware was Core2duo 6600 and 2GB RAM; I must thank my friend Loocas Duber who borrowed me his computer for that when he was at Siggraph. So it’s time to put all passes together.
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