Hi,

I wanted to, for some time, create an image with a lot of rain and a stormy weather in it. I had never done this before, and I wanted to start this personal challenge. After seeing the The Museum competition featuring the Neue Nationalgalerie that Ronen was hosting, I thought that this museum could be a good test case and a good exercise.

During this making of, I’ll try to explain the process I followed to make this image.

Thank you all for reading.

Starting with the result in mind…

3d Modeling

Modeling is really simple. For each object, I started with a box, and I played with the Edit Poly modifier. Around the scene, I placed some buildings and trees to create reflections on my ground.

I added some puddles with a plane and some modifiers.

The Camera

I used a VRay Physical Camera for this project. Note that I work with gamma 2.2.

I changed some parameters such as the f-number, shutter speed and ISO. Also, I lowered the vignetting because I prefer to create it in Photoshop instead… Not having it burned into the render output.

Exterior Lighting

I started to illuminate my outdoors scene with an HDRI. I prefer to work the lighting before starting any texturing. Get the light balance right first. I created my HDRI with a VRay Light Dome, where I put a VRayHDRI in the texture slot. I can then work with it, in the material editor.

Also, I put a light gray material in the override slot to give this color for all my objects, except windows. It is a habit that I developed over time…

Texturing

Nothing difficult for texturing. I used a lot of maps from CGTextures. I happened to make some small adjustments in Photoshop, for example to the contrast of maps.

Interior Lighting

For the interior of the gallery, I added two types of VRay Plane Lights.

The first is a high intensity to light the insides, but I disabled “affect specular” and “affect reflections” because the reflection was too intense on the ground.

The second is of low intensity, but I left all options activated to simulate the reflections on my ground.

Rendering

Now, it’s time to render that. Here are the settings I used.

Before running the render, I also disabled the visibility of trees and buildings. These are used only for the reflections on the ground. My render is in 5000px X 2170px. LARGE, I know 😉

This one here is a smaller version of it…

Post Production with Photoshop

I started retouching some elements, including the ground, the wall, puddles and stairs. I work a lot with layers “brightness contrast” to give more contrast to objects.

In addition, I add some texture such as the dirt on the wall, or droplets on the ground.

After that, I worked on the background.

For the sky, I used two maps. I also placed some buildings and trees that I found on the net. And finally, I created an atmosphere. For this, I used a layer with the cloud filter. I added contrast and a blue tint.

Next, I added an ambient occlusion pass that I calculated before. I put some characters on the outside and inside the museum. And I added reflections on the windows. To do this, I placed some buildings and trees in “soft light”, and played with the opacity.

I realized the rain with a fiber layer. Then I played with motion blur and opacity. I created several layers. Two for the general rain, and two for the rain falling on the edges of objects.

Next, I decided to put leafs to enhance the intensity of the wind. Back in the 3d scene.

I modeled a leaf, and I used the 3dsmax built in particle flow tool to simulate a multitude of leafs in the wind. So I placed a gravity, wind source, and a deflector to simulate the collision with the ground. And I played with some parameters, such as the rotation of leafs before and after the collision, or the wind parameters.

After that, I made ??an orange light in the center of the image. For this, I used several orange photo filter and orange layers in “screen” mode. And a curve to enhance the intensity.

Then I made a folder where I place my final filters that give the right colors that I want for my image. In general, I use the color balance very slightly. I added a blue photo filter on the edges because I wanted to make a contrast of orange / blue with the center / edge of the image. Also, I slightly desaturated it.

After that, I added back the vignetting. It is composed of a black vignetting in “normal” mode and a blue vignetting in “color” mode, always for the contrast of orange / blue I aimed for.

Finally I duplicated and merged all layers, to put a slight accent. I finally finished with a glow layer to accentuate the intensity of parts of white color.

Final image once more…

Conclusion

I hope that you enjoyed this short tutorial…

Also, I’m aware that I’m a beginner. So if you have any constructive comments, constructive criticism, which will progress me and advance me, I’ll be really delighted to read them.

Thank you all,

Cheers, Romuald.