Making of Elcanoby Dario Lanza Web: www.dariolanza.com


If there's something plentiful on a sailing ship like this are ropes. Ropes everywhere. Furthermore, to increase the realism of the model, I propose myself that all the ropes have different width and color. I distributed all the cables in five categories due five different widths, and six or seven color categories. This way, there was no more than two ropes showing the same width and color combination on the whole ship.

For this task, I used LwCAD, a set of modeling tools for CAD modeling in Lightwave, that allowed me to work with an incredible accuracy and speed in this kind of models.

So, this way I draw the splines defining the path of every cable and I could give them the desired width in just one step.



The finish touch was the figurehead, the only organic modeling in this project.



Texturing

Modeling the ship was very laborius, but texturing it was relatively simple. Except for some metallic adornments, the whole of the elements was diffuse materials very easy to configure.

Setting up the Scene and Lighting

I created a plane for the ocean and another plane for camera background. I used an open sea and sky photographs that I took on my holidays, both in Front Projection, to make them visible from the camera view.

With a brush in Photoshop, I painted some white strokes over the photograph of the sea. When activating Radiosity, the secondary bounces of the photons on this white strokes will produce some nice color bleeding, lighting the surrounding surfaces with subtle bright touches, simulating the reflections on the waves foam.


For the lighting setup I used three Distant lights: a key light for simulating the sun (with its color and position), a fill light (bluish to improve the blue sky contribution), and another light just for the sails, which allowed me to control precisely the look of the lights and shadows projected over the sails.

I put the photograph of the sky on the backdrop dome, and enabled Radiosity in MonteCarlo mode, just to create the bluish global illumination from the blue sky on a sunny day. I didn't used neither Ambient Occlusion nor HDR images.

For the render I used Fprime, an amazing real-time renderer for Lightwave, to speed up the Lightwave native render engine, and be able to see real-time feeback.

This is the look of the raw render as it came directly from Lightwave.



I prepared an Alpha pass of every sail, which allowed me to isolate each sail and work them individually.



Adding Details and Post-Production

Recently, I do prefer taking faster and less elaborated renders, and afterwards adding the rest of the details on the postproduction process. In general, the more tasks I leave for postproduction, the more control I get over the image.

So, in Photoshop, I pasted some sailors photographs and desk details, caustic reflections over the hull, the wave splashes and foam, and even a couple of seagulls.

To make the pleants on the sails, I took some photographs from a folded sheet, and overlaid them using different Blending Modes (my favourite are Overlay and Multiply).

I'm specially happy with the look of the sails at the bow. I added a subtle fog and depth blur to improve the marine mood.

Finally, after some color correction, the render was ready to send to the client.



I would like to have a little more time to make the project with more calm and taking care of the details, but we all know how the deadlines are, don't you? I hope you have enjoyed this making of and found it interesting for your work. Keep on rendering!


About the Author - After finising the studies as Engineer at the Politechnical University of Madrid, I started exploring other more artistic fields. I studied photography, screeplay writing and cinematography filmmaking, untill I discovered Photoshop. Soon I got the first freelances and jobs for web sites. I worked for 3 years as web-designer at the agency BBDO. After that, I studied a Master in 3D Design with Lightwave.