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This is my final submission. Have used minimum postproduction as intended. Few curves to brighten up certain areas like ground and building, Color Lookup, and few channels for certain parts.
Really enjoyed this challenge it was very motivating and interesting to take part in. Thank you Tomorrow and Ronen for the opportunity. I wish all the contestants best of luck.
I started shading process with the most important material in the scene – wood panels, and then moved on to the environment and props. Black plywood material seemed very challenging at first, but at the end it turned out that it is not. There was obviously some trial and error involved, but hey! thats how we learn.
Glass material and reflections was the next important shader to recreate. As the panoramic window of “the white box” gallery is the focal point of my scene, shader needed to be interesting and replicated architectural glazing. To do that I assigned random ID’s to glass panes and created multi subobject with 4 glass materials. Each glass material had a noise mup in bump with different parameters for phasing. I have also turned on reflect double sided and used fog color and altered Max depth to 10. The indepth tips on that subject you can find on The Boundary website. I suggest you have a look and try, as it proved to be a very useful tip to replicate real architectural glasing.
When shading I always like to work with override material and only exlude parts which I am working on. As I go along there will be less and less parts excluded, and at the end I end up with the completely shaded scene. Working with override allows me to cut a bit of time during calculation phases.
The vegetation needed some love too, but nothing more than adjusting hue and saturation in diffuse. The plants and trees that I was using had a distinguished autumn look ( with bright orange and yellow colors), but wanted to have more dirty and washed out look. After that, I swapped the foreground tree to a more detailed one and gave berries a bit of frost. It was done simply in diffuse layer with a falloff map (towards away direction). I have also created spider web in the foreground. It was generated using script Cobwebs by Joker Martini. Struggled a bit with spider web shader, but then realised it is nothing more than glass shader but with a lot less refraction to it.
Few words about atmosphere. It was the first time me using environment fog directly embeded into the image , but I wanted to give it a try, due to the fact that my aim was to minimise post-production stage. I have used 2 fogs – general and 2nd closer to the building on box gizmo with noise to give it a bit more variation.
I’m pretty sure I missed a lot, but that’s it for the shading and atmosphere and I guess the next submission will be my final one.
Good luck
Once the modelling was done, I immediately wanted to get the environment out of the way. Simply because it takes one of the main roles in my story. However, I didn’t intend to change the landscape, I had to slightly alter the vegetation and position of the sea, but the principle of having the pathway to the sea and presence of castle in the back stayed.
I started my work on improving ground planes, which I previously mocked up during modelling. I have now created planes with more polygons and have properly terminated edges where needed. To create uneven edge, planes intersect each other at a slight angle. After I used VRayDisplaceMod to create ground with a bit of snow. As if it was snowing in the morning and now it is melting, and ground is visible in places. I have also used displacement on the path to the building and then scattered a few cobblestones on top using ForestPack.
After finishing with ground I moved on to small vegetation. As I have already mentioned in my concept stage, I wanted to create a midseason feeling between late autumn and winter. Therefore there will be a bit of desaturated brown vegetation and a few patches of low grass still visible. Again here I used ForestPack and created Forest object for each type of grass I used to have more control. Moreover, I scattered some leaves on the ground to show, that leaves are still falling from trees and it is not winter time yet. (The scene does have quite a bit of Forest objects =))
Once I’ve done that, there was a bit of time spent on framing the view and layering some elements on the foreground. I like to do it manually, as opposed to Forest pack, as it gives you more control.
As for the lighting setup it is very simple and easy. The setup I’m using is a PG Dawn sky set to gamma 0.75 and linked with VRay Sun. Linking sun to HDRI has become incredibly fast once I’ve heard of the plugin Find and Bind by Nir Koshet Levi. I have also spent time on positioning the sun so that it doesn’t show in the reflection as a bright blob. But, that’s about it.
Stay tuned for more.
I like to start modelling only when I fully understand the building. Without the correct understanding, it’s likely you would need to remodel some details a couple of times. When you don’t have any information apart from jpeg’s – tracing plans and sections in Cad helps to get that knowledge. Halfway through tracing I had that “wrong feeling” when I got a bit carried away and started drawing the wooden panels on elevations/sections. I was right – I ended up not using wooden panel reference lines at all. Sections of the panel detail and photographs gave me more than enough info on the detailing and measurement. Modelling itself was quite straightforward. As I have more or less decided with camera angle I would like to use, I didn’t have to spend extra time modelling the back of the building and its old extension. That way I’m allowing myself enough time to focus more on getting artistic elements right (which I enjoy most)
The only difficulty for me, which at the end turned out to be quite a simple resolution is modelling planks. For that, I used floor generator and simple rotation and Voila!
I have also quickly mapped out where the path and ground geometry should be, imported the model of Kalmar castle and outlined the direction of the sun.
I will update you on the light studies tomorrow.
The first thing, that I did when started the project, was to gather references, as most of us do. By, analyzing the photographs I came to conclusion, that the most compositionally powerful and attractive part of the building to show is the façade of so-called “white box” gallery facing the park.
Atmosphere.
Through not so difficult research on google maps I noticed, that Kalmar can be very foggy, cold and atmospheric at times. And due to the fact that I come from cold, Northern country, I believe this mood and atmosphere are very familiar to me. It evokes feelings of the past and my childhood and that is what I miss most, living in the country where I am now. In the image I wanted to express not only my artistic skills and abilities, but also to show my personality. I remember clearly that midseason period (usually mid-November, but sometimes even late October) when not all of the leaves have fallen from trees, but winter is already on the doorstep. In my image I was looking to implement the findings about atmosphere of Kalmar and that time of the year I sometimes remember and want to come back in.
Color.
With the colour choices I made I decided to highlight, that the building is located in the Nordic Country. The colour palette was dictated by the huge amount of minimal Nordic inspirations found on Pinterest and web resources. I believe that the colour choice I made represents peace of mind, openness and purity of both nature and people living in these surroundings.
Landscape.
As for the landscape, I decided not to invent a wheel by changing the landscape completely. I suppose, this building was made for its location and is perfectly balanced with nature. What I can do as an artist to present this architecture is to slightly alter atmosphere/mood/season or even landscape in some places, play with colour to make it pop and appeal to viewers.
Light
Lighting comes along with atmosphere and mood. To communicate my idea I will use low light sun, which would give that slightly goldish tint to the image and add to the desaturated late fall colours along with highlighting the material of the façade.
That concludes my concept section.
