
Texturing and shading This time, I’ve approached the image in a way that’s a bit different than my usual production workflow. Typically, I’ll have a model to be textured, and sent over to the next person (sometimes the next person is me), and it has to hold up in various camera angles and motions. Here, I could think less about perfectly textured objects, and more about the way an object adds to the texture of the whole image. Sometimes, a phong with flat color did the trick. Where it didn’t, I’ve rendered separate texture passes to be overlaid in post. Much more often, I’ve used glossy V-Ray materials with various textures. Almost all reflections in the scene are blurred. The textures I’ve used are mostly photo sourced, either from my own library, or from the Web. There aren’t many object-specific textures. If I needed localized detail, I either did it as a separate pass, or just painted it in post. Because of that, I didn’t need to do almost any UV’s – box and cylindrical mappings were enough for most objects. UV’s take time, and time was in short supply here.	Some texture samples – in the background, color/bump/reflection texture of the ground. Click to enlarge

Rendering and postproduction
I’m never happy with the way raw renderings look and some things are just impractical to do in 3D. So, most the mood, the way the image finally looks, comes from postproduction. For that purpose I usually render a ton of passes. Occlusion is always useful, but only for subtle use. Z-depth is essential, both for atmosphere, and for color correction. A Normal Direction pass, used with occlusion, fresnel and flat texture passes is a great way to add subtle rim lights without rendering them in 3D. Volumetrics speak for themselves, as well as a few layers of particle junk floating in the air.

With all the passes roughly layered, comes the time for painting in the small details – some dirt here, some highlight there. Then come a lot of adjustment layers for color correction, and lots of gradients for depth, vignettes and generally guiding the eye around the image. Somewhere inbetween, I’ve added a few texture overlays, and lots of photographic smoke. This adds nice details to the clean, CG-looking volumetrics. Some additional light shafts were created entirely in 2D as well.

I like that part of creation very much. Actually, it’s easy to get lost in there, and forget about the ‘real world’, but it’s a greatly satisfying experience. The CGChallenge deadline limited the time I could spend playing with the image. There’s always something to fix, but I have to stop some time, preferably while it’s still fun, not while I’m sick of looking at the image.

Comparision – raw render, and final image.

About the author
Andrzej Sykut has been playing with CG for nearly nine years now. Currently he is working at Platige Image, mostly doing TV commercials. When he can, he practices his other passions – mountain biking, photography, reading a good book and sometimes creating some personal art like the one described here. Andrzej Sykut was awarded the Texturing prize with great stash from Softimage, Luxology, ImagineFX, Ballistic Publishing and CGSociety.

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