Studio: Phil Ryan

Personal / Commissioned: Personal

I was inspired by the Grieghallen tutorial by Tamas Medve
(featured a long time ago on the blog) to try my hand at making his
wet stone pavers before the competition was ever announced.
When the competition started, I figured it would be a good
opportunity to both add to my portfolio while also testing the
pavers in a full scene.
My computer at home is quite old and as such it really can’t handle
large expansive scenes, or scenes with a lot of assets or accessories
so I had to be clever about chosing my camera angle. Luckily I
found a reference photo of the building online which I used as my
inspiration. The angle is suitably dramatic and also limits the
amount of background scenery I would have to build, allowing me
to focus on the lighting and materials and not worry about my
computer dying!
The scene itself is fairly straightforward spline modeling for the
most part. The pavers out the front are a simple texture with a
custom displacement as in Tamas’ tutorial – with a plane of water
put on top to simulate the puddles. The background (and the
reflection in the windows) are free building models downloaded
from 3dsky.org and most of the textures came from my own
personal library, Arroway or Textures.com. The background trees
are a simple forestpack with some zDepth applied in post
production. I made extensive use of the Corona Light Mix as it
allowed me to leave my computer render the scene out once (as it
took forever on my old machine) and then tweak the lighting
afterwards to get it looking how I wanted. I don’t think I would
have had the time otherwise to adjust the lighting in the short
amount of time I spent on the project (overall I think it was 3 days
after work).