Making of End of the Line by Silvia Palara, USA


Texturing

I usually light before texturing, but I couldn't find the right background to match my lighting with, so I started with the textures, hoping to come by the ideal background later on.

I always paint my own textures, because I can never find the perfect photographic textures. The bridge sides are a brick texture, with dirt, mold, and cracks painted by hand. The rust shader is a mix of Maya procedural materials, and hand painted textures. The slimy water is a Maya layered texture.

The hardest part was creating the displacement maps, because they can be tricky to control. They ended up as a rather lengthy shading network that mixed the brick and cracks texture of the rest of the bridge with noise and fractal shader. A simplified version was used for the rubble.


Lighting and Rendering

I just couldn’t find a background, so I took two photos that I liked, and composite them into one. Of course they had to be matched in color and lighting. Then I used that as reference and painted my sky on top of it all, just the way I liked it.

Since my scene had water, HDR Image Based Lighting was a must, but I was back to having to find one that fit, especially since I can’t paint over a HDRI like I did for sky. With trial and error, I got one that more or less fit, but knew I would have to do much post work.

Mental Ray is an amazing renderer, and I use it for all my projects. Unfortunately, it crawls to a halt when it has to deal with things like HDRI, displacement, and Maya layered shaders, all strongly used in my scene, so the rendering part of the project was often akin to watching paint dry.

Effects and Compositing

I was left with my nemesis: the swamp plants. Any attempt to use Maya Paint Effects was unsuccessful, so I creating my own geometry. The problem with plants is that they all look similar and yet each is unique. Plus I wanted to place them precisely, but it was impractical to place them one by one. Since particles can be painted, I tried sprites, but all the grass looked the same. I added to my grass geometry as many parameters as I could: branches whose visibility could be turned on or off, deformers, etc. Then I wrote a MEL script that used the painted particles as position for the geometry. At every position, the script assigned random values to the geometry parameters, so that no two copies would look the same.

Initially I had decided to add the mist over the swamp in post, but it looked like white fluff pasted over the existing image. So I created a poly cube, right above the water, and textured with a volumetric shader, and rendered it by itself. I abundantly tweaked it in Photoshop, and then put it on a different layer.

I wasn’t too happy with the rust, so I re-painted it from scratch. The slime floating in the water didn't feel slimy enough to me, so I modified the layered shader to make the slime look half submerged. Some of the textures on the rubble looked stretched or pixilated, so I took care of that. The lighting wasn’t quite there, so I adjusted it to get the low contrast typical of the diffuse light of cloudy, foggy days. I brought everything into Photoshop and desaturated all colors. I did the final minor adjustments, and came out the final image.