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
