Hi, everyone. First time I saw this project my decision was to enter the Challenge since it is an extremely interesting architectural piece. When researching the Art Museum location, many things about Kalmar felt interesting. The old historic town, with extraordinary architectural pieces, one of them our subject – Tham & Videgård’s Art Museum, another one – Kalmar Slott. The later felt like an interesting motif of the contrast between old and new. By contrast, I mean the plain difference between modern times and the ancient ones. It shows the progress of people and the inheritance carried over through times.
With that in mind, I decided to base my concept on that exact contrast. That goes hand in hand with the natural and realistic look of the image that was demanded since the Art Museum is really close to the Kalmar Slott and could be photographed from the angle that shows both of the extraordinary pieces. Another thing that made the story interesting is the fact that the Art Museum is situated in the City Park, near the Baltic Sea.

Main guiding principles: Art Museum, Kalmar Slott, dark wood, park, water, a contrast between old and new architecture.

During the next few days, I will post the working process with the quick draft sketch consisting of the capture of the 3DS Max viewport.

Finally I decided the environment of my proposal,It was sketched on photoshop and the final image It will a Meadow with yellow flowers, an old person who is walking to the build.
It is a concept inspired by the film Tomorrowland from Disney. The challenge will be to modelling everything: flower,mountains, the old person and a couples bees on the flowers in less than 2 weeks. 🙂

I started doing the most important materials of the scene, the black wood of the museum and the snow. Both take up enough space of the image, are affected and affect the lighting different ways. I also modeled the kamakura lamps in the snow.
I picked an HDRI for my chosen time and set the lights in their real positions, set up the vray physical camera and did a test render to see if the actual lamps were enough for the scene, or I would need to put some false lighting to get to the mood I wanted. I was satisfied with the initial result and decided to continue on this path, only slightly changing the settings of the camera to brighten the image a bit more and add a lamp post to the back of the scene for aditional detail.
For now I will work on improving the wood material (adding randomness and better reflections to improve the level of detail seen on dark places), the grass poking on the snow and mask the frozen area of the stairs (now she is fully frozen).I also noticed that the wood facing the camera was too dark and decided to reinforce the lighting in the stairwell.