At this `Work process` I`d like to explain how I created material of corten steel. At the very beginning I was thinking to create nice material with Substance Painter, but it wasn`t a really good decision because in that case I can create one-project-material and I want to make something more multipurpose, material which I can use in future projects.

I found nice corten texture and divide it on few smaller ones to get randomness on my corten panels. So my basic material it`s quite complicated blend material with few levels of dirt and BW masks to looks as realistic as possible, which later I copied few times with different numbers on AO.

I made separate materials for different levels of panels:
1. Wet panels under windows with a different intensity of AO and glossiness.
2. Dry panels from sunny side.
3. Top panels with dirt only on edges.
4. Lower panels with ground dirt.
5. Vertical panels.
6. Material for window frames.

My idea is to show the main building as being discovered by someone walking through the city, in the middle of the old buildings so as to show urban context.
At first i tried to find the best composition by walking through the model but i wasn’t satisfied with the image I came up with. Therefore, i turned to drawn sketches to have a clearer idea of the layout and lighting I was looking for. I wanted to be as close to reality as possible and thankfully, there are a lot of good reference images out there, so i decided to replicate street signs, manholes, benches, garbage bins, street lights and use bikes as props in the final image. As for the lighting i’m going for an overcast day with very diffuse shadows, and a warm light coming from the main building, displaying an average day of classes at the school. The easy part is now over, which is modelling everything, and now I have to do all the texturing, something that I find a lot more challenging.

I think half of the work is over: lighting, shaders and details satisfy me.

I do not give more importance to the pure 3D part or to the post production, both workflows are according to the final result: create an artistically effective image that satisfies the customer.

For the following project, taking into consideration the fact of presenting only one point of view, I chose to create a good base (nothing technically extreme) and then to rely on photoshop for the inclusion of an important factor of the initial concept: the univeritary students.

The inclusion of people into the images helps to contextualize the environment and give a more human and emotional factor to the final work.