Making of End of the Line by Silvia Palara, USA



Concept and Inspiration

I created this image for the CGArena Haunted challenge and won the second prize. Knowing in advance the theme of the image, I tried to think of what other participants would choose (haunted houses, ghostly encounters, cemeteries...) and tried to go in as different a direction as I could. I vaguely knew my image would contain ruined stone, rusty metal, and water, and elaborating on that is how the idea of a railroad disaster came to be.

For this image I decided to do everything by the books, starting with as many sketches as I could, until I got a good composition, both in terms of forms and colors. The sketching was done mostly during work meetings (I am a software engineer), where I learned the invaluable skill of how drawing and making it look like taking notes. Once I got a sketch finalized, I scanned it into Photoshop and finalized the colors.


Modeling

Maya is my 3D tool of choice. For the bridge and the railroad, I used reference I found on the web. The wheels were done "freehand", because I couldn’t find an image of train wheels that I liked. Ground and water were simple planes.

The hardest part was, of course, the collapsed part of the bridge and the rubble. For the bridge, I started with a flat surface, then pushed and pulled vertices to give it a rough look, knowing that most of the work would be done with displacement maps. The rubble is made of cubes with faces and vertices pushed and pulled to give them irregular shapes.

For the swamp plants, I tried Maya Paint Effects, but since I render in Mental Ray, they had to be polygons, and the conversion gave bad results. I decided to forget about it for now.