Tutorial: Making of "A Passage" by Pradipta Seth , India

Texturing

Texturing was a challenge in this particular scene. I used Unwarp UVW in most cases. For the wall first I added an Unwarp UVW and then took the map into the Photoshop and placed several layers of texture maps on the base. The picture below shows how base layer containing the Unwarp UVW grid is placed.


I used around 20-25 medium resolution maps for the entire texturing procedure. The process went like this way; I took a base texture for the wall from my collection and placed on top of the Unwarp UVW layer. Then I added moss layer, stain layer and water mark layer accordingly.

Once this major texturing is done I added some special layers that contain a tic-tac-toe and graffiti sign. I used various layer blending method to seamlessly match the layers with the base layer, for example Multiply, Screen and Overlay.

The backdrop is given a blue colored wall. I was trying with different color and found blue color quite appealing for this scene. For the window and shutter I used an aged wood texture with lots of variation in color.

Lighting

I used one target light and one omni light as fill light in the scene. The picture shows the placement of the lights.

I placed a sky light to used with Light Tracer. There was something more with the light setup. I needed to create a nice shadow in the foreground area. That was achieved using a light blocker in front of the light path. As shown here a box is placed so that to cast a good shadow in the corridor.

Post Processing

Rendering process involved some tweaking with the light and shaders to get the proper mood in the scene. I tested with various light settings and shaders for couple of hours before coming to a satisfactory level.

I used Light Tracer of Scanline renderer with Bounce value 2. Then I took the raw render image in Photoshop and did some color correction. I mainly work with Curve, HSL and Channel Mixer to correct the contrast level. Beside these I also had to manually use Dodge and Burn tool for perfection.

I hope this article will be interesting to read and also be informative for you. Thank you for your time. Feel free to comment on this and send me your queries at my email address.