Sit comfortably back to your armchairs and have a look at this “Making of” article by Lukasz Gradzki from Renderare.com

Hi There,

Few shots we produced for 3LHD Architects, most of them are purely CGI apart from one photomontage.

The client provided the site photography for their chosen location.

At the beginning we used Lightroom to rectify and straighten and initially adjust the photo. This of course could have been done in Photoshop also, it was just personal preference as we very often work with whole sets of photos and Lightroom is much better tailored for handling dozens of photos simultaneously.

The 3D Model was constructed by the architects and they had very clear ideas about the viewpoints and light setups required. Our additions to the model obviously included sun/daylight system matching the situation in the photo, additional VRay lights to illuminate the facades slightly, cars, foliage and lots of people populated across the scene using MultiScatter.

We’ve also put a bit of simple geometry with VRayLight material and self illuminating texture applied – this is not visible to camera, reflections and shadows but helps to illuminate the interiors.

Nothing special here in terms of global illumination, just VRay Sun, VRay Sky with irradiance map and light cache on default settings.

Apart from the final RGB render we always calculate a few more passes, usually MaterialID and Render ID – it never hurts and often saves a lot of time while making selections in PS.

The original photo was taken during a hazy winter day in Zagreb with the sun in front of the camera – a not very favorable setup, but I believe we took a few steps in turning this to our advantage and create a moody image.

The trees in front had to be retained and masking here was achieved by a mixture of color range selection and some painting on an additional layer to get rid of the bright outlines around the small branches and leaves.

The raw render result was apparently very far from the photo, in terms of color balances, contrast etc., but after a few adjustments of both the proposed building and background, they were brought much more closer together.

Layer mask applied to the render.

Background plate was lacking some contrast and was washed out because of the sun glaring through mist so we’ve adjusted it with combination of levels adjustment, medium contrast in curves and delicate color balance towards warmth in midtones.

Car and people looked too artificial with their vibrant colors, hence the ground floor area was replaced with another quick render with darker lighting.

Increasing contrast of the building using mix of levels and curves, similarly as we did with the photo.

Decreasing saturation of the building and slight color balance correction again towards warm tones.

Left side of the building adjusted with color balance to make it a bit blueish to blend it better with the cold sky above.

At the end just a few touches like glow, lens flare from the sun and some film grain was applied to the building to blend it in. In the end we cropped the image from the bottom to give it a better composition.

That’s all – If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line at lukasz@renderare.com

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Subdivision surfaces
What if I told you, that the items from the the picture above are one and the same object, with only very small changes? They were actually cubes in the beginning, the only difference is, that Item 2 is a subdivision surface and Item 3 is a subdivided mesh. What subdividing a mesh means, is adding segments to the existing geometry and at the same time making the whole surface smoother. Every level of subdivision divides an existing quad (4-sided polygon) into 4 new polygons, therefore if our cube consisted of 6 polygons to begin with, the first subdivision will turn it into a mesh with 24 polygons, the second subdivision will multiply the polycount by 4, that gives us 96 polygons, and after 3 subdivisions, our object will consist of 384 polygons and look a lot more spherical then in the begining. The subdivision process can be seen in the picture below:

Now is the right time to ask, what is so special about this subdivision surfaces (item 2 in the first picture). Items 2 and 3 look the same, and have the same polygon count. Wouldn`t it be more effective to just use heavily segmented objects, or freeze the object after it has been subdivided? Well, no… it wouldn`t.
You see, the basic part of every mesh is a vertex, a point in space. It is vertexes, that define edges and polygons, and therefore every vertex has to carry a lot of data, starting with its position in space, through UV coordinates, which can include data for several UV maps, to special data like vertex maps, morph maps or tags. Once a mesh is segmented, it consists of lots and lots of vertexes, and every single vertex has to carry all of this information. To show, how much data is added with every subdivision, I prepared another picture. As you can see below, the square was subdivided one time, adding 5 new vertexes (black dots) to the already existing 4 (orange dots), this means a massive increase in data.

Luckily, there is a special kind of mesh (a static mesh in Modo for example), that behaves a little like a proxy object, it gets the data needed for its editability deleted, which makes it uneditable, but much more effective in RAM consumption and other operations, like moving it or rotating the viewport.
When applying a subdivision modifier to your mesh, it takes the basemesh as a source for a new mesh, that is not directly editable, therefore needs much less data to represent it. This new mesh is called a subdivision surface. You are free to edit the subdivision level (the segmentation of the mesh) and at any time, you can return to the basemesh and edit it, which wil instantly affect the subdivision surface.
I did a few test renderings, to see how much data each of the objects in the first picture needs to represent it. Item 2, the subdivision surface, consists of 3072 polygons and consumes 279 kB of RAM during rendertime. Item 3 has a polycount of 3072 polygons as well and is a subdivided mesh, which means, every single vertex has to carry all the necessary information, therefore it consumed 493 kB of Ram at rendertime. You see, these identical meshes consume very different amounts of resources, only due to their surface representation.
Not only are subdivision surfaces more effective in resource consumption, they are even easier to edit. Just think about it, is it easier to move one vertex or edge and get a clean and smooth shape, or play around with selections on a dense mesh and once you finally have the right selection, you have to start playing around with falloffs or soft selection tools? I find the first way much faster, easier and cleaner. Just see for yourself:

The first image is the polygon cage of a lions head (originally part of a hood ornament for a 1936 peugeot 402 i`m modelling at the time). It may not look great in its unsubdivided form, but once it`s changed into a subdivision surface, as shown on the second picture on the left, it starts to shape up a bit. On the right is the dense segmented mesh, which has the exact same number of polygons and will look exactly the same in a render, but takes up approximately twice as much resources, and just imagine the horror of trying to change a detail about the polygon-heavy segmented mesh!

Still not convinced about the advantages of subdivision surfaces? Would an automated subdivision level convince you? Adaptive subdivision is a common tool today. As the name already says, it is able to adapt its subdivision level to the needs of your render. The system behind this is really easy: you choose, how long an edge can be in pixels, after this, the render engine evaluates the edges of every object separately, and if it finds an edge, that takes up more pixels than the value you provided, it increases the objects subdivision level by one until all edges are shorter then your pixel value. This system makes sure, that every object in your render appears to be smooth, but doesn`t take up any more resources then necessary.

As a little bonus, I added the model of the lion`s head with textures, so you can render an image like this one, if you like:

The model may be downloaded as the native .lxo file for modo users, or as an .obj file, both the polygon cage, as a highpoly version for users, whose software doesn`t have the subdivision surface technology implemented yet.

Download Links:

Lion head in .OBJ

Lion head for Modo

Lion head – highpoly – in .OBJ

Lion head textures

Lion head hdri

That is all for today. I hope you liked this little introduction into subdivision surfaces and with luck, we will meet again during another tutorial.

Please don`t get me wrong, this won`t be a step-by-step tutorial how to create the exact rock I made. There is no point in doing so, since you can download it for free at www.flyingarchitecture.com , I`ll rather show you the workflow and principles involved in the creation, so you can make your own rocks (hopefuly even nicer then the ones I made) or even use the techniques on compeltely different models. This tutorial assumes some basic knowledge of the used tools, but I`m sure even unexperienced users can at least get an idea about the workflow.

Another thing, that wil make this tutorial different from the others I made is, that it`s going to be more Modo-centered, I can`t really guarantee, that all of the used principles and tools will have an equivalent in other software ( like 3ds max, cinema 4d, maya or others). Here`s a basic overview of what we are going to do in this tutorial:
First, we will create a rough parametric form with the help of displacement and procedural textures.
In the next step, we will learn how to freeze the displaced geometry.
Once frozen, we can retopologize it.
And then, after a quick sculpt, unwrap and texture-painting, all in Luxology`s Modo, the rock will be ready to use!

I feel obliged to tell you, that the making of the parametric rock is just something I recently saw in a tutorial, so I`m not as much of a genius as you might think. The problem with that tutorial was, that it ended after displacing the simple surface, leaving you with a heavy mesh. Our rock will have much less polygons (although the optimization process does take its time). Let`s start off with a simple cube.

A cube is a good start for most of your models. All we have to do now, is to make it ready for the displacement. I did it by subdividing it twice.

A quadball would do the trick as well. After hitting the “Tab” key for creating a subdivision surface, we can apply the material with displacement. I used a cellular procedural texture with the pojection type “solid”. To get a the shape of a real stone, you have to change the displacement distance in the material properties and the texture size in the texture locator proporties. Playing around with the texture settings is then completely up to you, what each button and slider does can be found in the inline help system inside Modo. One last remark to this step is, that you will have to use the preview wieport, since the displacement from procedural textures isn`t displayed in the regular viewports, as you can see in the following image:

What we need now, is to translate the displacement into actual geometry. We can do so by baking the procedural texture into a blank bitmap. After creating the blank bitmap and setting its effect to displacement (make sure it`s above the procedural texture), just right click on the bitmap and select “bake to texture” from the context menu. Modo will then look for all sources ( bitmaps, procedural textures and even ambient occlusion passes), that contribute to the final displacement, and bake them into one single bitmap! Cool, isn`t it?

After the bake, the geometry changes in the viewport as well. In the image bellow, you can see the baked texture with the geometry in the viewport side-by-side.

Now, it`s time to freeze the geometry. Before we do that, let`s increase the subdivision level of the mesh to get a cleaner shape after freezing. We don`t have to care about the mesh density, since we will only use this object as a refference for retopology. As shown in the image bellow, the freeze command can be found under Geometry > Freeze, just make sure “Freeze Displacement” is on.

And this is how the frozen mesh should look like.

Once the mesh is frozen, we can start with the retopology. It`s really no big deal. Just turn on the background constraint (in Modo 501, just press f11 for the snapping options pop-up and select “background constraint”, like in the image bellow), and you can start creating a new mesh with clean topology.

What the background constraint does, is that it constrains active geometry to background geometry (which is probably not hard to deduce from the tool`s name). I`ll just take the time, and explain it quickly, since it can cause some confusion for new users: background geometry is every mesh, tha isn`t part of the mesh item you are currently working with. Look at the image bellow. In the Itemlist, the object “Cube” is highlighted. This is our active item. The Item “mesh” isn`t highlighted, therefore it is our background item.

With the background constraint active, I started to draw the shape of the rock with the pen tool in a new layer (the displaced and frozen mesh is our background mesh). The new points will slide over the background mesh. I won`t show the retopology process, since there is nothing complicated about it and every model is unique. Just a small tip: if you have a problem with the new geometry disappearing somewhere behind the backgroud mesh, you can set an offset distance, so the new mesh you are drawing will be floating over the background mesh and therefore will be visible at all times. (with the “push” tool from the deform tab, you can adjust the new mesh to fit the dimensions of the background mesh once you`re done.

This is my new topology, side-by-side with the background mesh ( the background mesh has been moved, to get a better look at the comparison).

The new mesh consists of 41 polygons, which would make it a good model for game assets. But I want a nice model for high-resolution still renders, so I`ll add a little detail now.
I started with subdividing the mesh a few times. I didn`t use smooth subdivision though, rather applied a facetted subdivision, so that the edges of my rock remain clearly visible. Bellow, you can see the subdivided mesh on the left, the same mesh with subdivision surface applied to it on the right.

It looks better already, not good enough though… the shape is too smooth and perfect to be a natural stone. This is where Modo`s great sculpting tools come in handy. When sculpting, most of us are used to work with very dense meshes, but in some cases (like this one for example), you can effectively edit meshes with very few polygons. When you use the sculpting tools, if you hold “ctrl” you get a reversed effect, for example, if I use the “push” tool, I get a bulge, if I hold ctrl while painting with the push tool, I get a crater. In the first step, I offsetted the centers of the flat sides of the stone a little inside with the push tool. The same way, I pushed the centers of the sharp edges a little inside, because you don`t often get perfectly straight lines in nature.
This is what I got:

It`s allready much better than before, but there is still room for improvement. I think that sharper edges could help a lot. The Tangent Pinch and Center Pinch tools are just right for this job. This is the final form of my mesh:

The next step before painting a texture would be unwrapping it. Again, if you don`t know how the unwrap tools work, there`s a lot of tutorials on this topic out there. Just a quick tip: use a checker texture to find distortions in your mapping. In my case, setting the seams for the unwrap along the hard edges created some nasty distortion along them for some unknown reason, but moving the seam by one edge did the trick.
This is what I got after unwrapping, relaxing, and packing the UV`s.

Once I was happy with my mapping, I started the texturing. First, create a blank image map with a big enough resolution to accomodate all the neccesary detail, then, in the paint tab, choose airbrush and an image ink ( I really like images from www.cgtextures.com) and start painting. Again, it`s no rocket science. The soft edges of your brush make the different strokes of your image ink texture blend together nicely, so after you`re done, it all looks natural. A really helpfull tool is the “auto scale”, which changes the image ink size automatically according to its distance from the mesh-canvas, so you don`t have to allways look, if your scale is the same across the whole mesh.

The same way, you could paint the bump and specular mesh, but since I am really really lazy, I used the diffuse map for bump and specular as well.

To give it an even more realistic look, I painted some moss over it, so it looks like a real stone, that`s been lying around somewhere out for some time now.

As a conclusion, I`d like to add the final image again:

It might take you some time at first, but with a bit of training, you can have a rock like this ready in some 20 minutes. It`s an easy model, which makes it a good training and can be an usefull asset to your library.

I hope you liked this tutorial and learned something new. If you made your own stones and are wiling to share them, don`t hessitate to send them to office@renderspirit.com .
I`m looking forward to your reactions and hopefully, we`ll meet again during a new tutorial.

Download all materials used in this tutorial here.
Have fun!

Someon Patarozliev started modeling this car for another scene and it was supposed to be just a low-poly half-finished model. The whole process took about 18-20 days from start to finish. There weren’t any blueprints available for this model at that time so he mostly used references and blueprints from a similar models. Original post here: link

Click the image to see full resolution composite!

Thanks to Diego Reales for sharing his awesome visualizations with us. You can visit their website HERE.

Autodesk celebrates it’s 20 years of 3ds Max creativity, the 3D software that shaped 3D world industry! Happy birthday, Autodesk, you deserve that! Original post: HERE