Author: Pawel Podwojewski
My name is Pawel Podwojewski and I am an architect and CG artist, owner and founder of MOTYW company. I live in Gdansk, the city in the north of Poland.

I am nearly 2 years on the market with my company and we’re still evolving. Basically, I started with 3d stills, architectural visualization. At this point I am aiming in animations and high detailed environment (nature) creation. I especially like to play with night scenes. The best part from in the production process for me is the search after perfect reflection and refraction in a night shot. Of course a day setup scene is a very hard thing as well but somehow nightshots seem to be more attractive.

I hope one day I’ll reach a level which will make my work recognizable and lasting in people’s memory.

Pawel was kind enough and prepared this article also for www.cgrecord.net, a great 3d news site you should check out. Feel free to comment about any aspect of this article or things you think need more detailed explanation. I’m sure Pawel will answer it all 🙂

Restaurant in Bordeaux Video

Restaurant in Bordeaux Image Gallery

Introduction

As mentioned above, this scene is a part of a more complex project that consist of three buildings. I tried to keep the poly count as low as possible. After the camera position was set I have added more details on the foreground.

Terrain / Ground

The idea for the terrain was very simple… some wooden chips in the main area and grass to get the scene more alive. I used a bitmap from www.cgtextures.com for the ground wood chips creation and also changed the diffuse map into a grayscale and adjusted the contrast with curves in order to get a proper displacement map.

After that was ready, I applied the V-Ray displacement modifier to a simple plane surface which was representing my terrain.

Grass

For this scene I have prepared some new grass and wheat models. I have used the basic edit poly techniques to achieve the final effect. Below you can see the rough geometry. I started with a single strand, one leaf and some seeds. I placed them by hand and multiplied using the Advanced Painter script developed by Herman Saksono. Each strand has a very simple texture that I have painted using photos as reference. When few small groups of strands were ready I have converted them into editable poly and attached into one object and in the end exported all geometry into V-Ray proxy. The proxies are represented through green and orange boxes visible in the scene screenshots.

Working on the light in dusk and night scenes is one of the most exciting elements in the whole creation process. This time I have used many V-Ray sphere lights to lit the interior and also photometric lights with IES distribution profiles to simulate halogen bulbs. The environment lighting consist of two basic sources.

Lighting

Ambient light which is the V-Ray sky combined with dome light and a direct light. The V-Ray sky map is not used directly though. To lit the scene and gain proper GI I have used a V-Ray dome light with the V-Ray sky map as texture. The V-Ray sky map was clipped to a target direct standard light in order to receive a nice ramp on it. In fact the direct light (standard) was turned off at all times. I know this might be confusing but in this particular scene the described setup worked in the most efficient way including time and quality of rendering.

Most of the lights inside the building have a bit orange color in them to achieve a warm feeling of the place.

Render Settings

Post Production

Postproduction in this case was pretty simple. The original rendering is a bit washed out of colors and contrast. To fix this I have played with curves and contrast. I Also used exposure control with some blue and orange tint and mixed the channels. Using the reflection filter channel I was able to control the reflections. The outside lamps have some glow. To achieve this effect I used the glow filter with elliptic masks and feather control to blend them nice. A color correction was also applied.

Raw rendering

Total lighting

ZDepth

Reflection filter

I also added a star filter. To do this we can use the line shape. Draw a line with the width that will fit to your composition in my case 2 pixels.

Once you have done that rasterizing the layer and apply to it a gradient with orange color, feather the sharp edges and adjust the position and rotation. To blend it better with the picture you can decrease the opacity level. Work with different width of stripes to gain a more realistic result.

I hope you have enjoyed this making of… My very best wishes to you all 🙂

Final image

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