Making of "Autumn In Turnin" by: Andrea Polato | All images and content © Andrea Polato.

TOPICS COVERED:

1. Working with reference photos
2. Material Settings
3. V-Ray render settings
4. Modeling Techniques

I saw this part of the city every morning when I went to university. One day I turned my head left and I saw this entrance. It was a rainy day and I took a photo with my cellphone. It’s important to get reference material when you try to represent something. I passed at a different time in the day to see how colors the change. I tried to catch as much particulars I can to give a possible aspect at the final image.

These are two photos to explain the basic shape of the entrance and some particulars like windows frames, metal works, etc...
Then I begin to model the main wall. I started from a plane and I made some boolean operations to cut the door and windows spaces. Then I thought about the texturing of this part. I took a screen grab of the front view of the wall and I began to add simple tiling, clean version of the wall texture. I made the bump map by desaturating the color map and adjusting the brightness and contrast values, growing the contrast. When I added some objects to the scene on the wall, I draw some dirt. I applied this map to the main faces on the front and I changed the id mat for the faces of the interior part.

Wireframe view showing the wall plane with boolean operations for the door and window openings. Also you can see how the wall texture map was applied to the geometry.

Clean Color Map

Bump Map

Color Map With Dirt

This is the whole scene with all objects and materials applied.

Straight objects were simple spline extruded. Where windows appears just boolean operations were used. For the cracked part I made a rectangle; then I refine one edge and add a noise modifier on the verticies of this edge on one axis so I obtained an irregular side; then I extruded the spline, I rotated on one axis and with boolean operation I cut the extra part. Material id for different colors.

The image on the left show the distribution objects for the leaves.

I created a plane for one leave with 3x3 segs and some noise; then mapped the plane with the leave and I use it for the scatter operator. The plane has a vol select with a smoke map for select the faces where leaves will place. The flying leaves has a spline with volume distribution.

The leaf plane was mapped with the opacity map and the color map in the appropriate channels.

The stone blocks of the footstep are just simple chamfer boxes with noise. Uvw mapping is set on box in order to distibute the map on the block.

These are the planes with the opacity channel which casts the shadows of the trees onto the building.

This is the final set of the scene, viewed from the V-Ray Physical Camera.

An occlusion pass was made made by using the V-Ray dirt material. For more information on how to use an occlusion pass have a look at this tutotial.

I made a render with the reinhard color mapping type: I used this because it has a good control on the burn value of the scene and it keeps the contrast.

The blur pass on the walking woman was made by animating the model and checking the motion blur pass on the camera rollout. It has to be considered as a moving object when we take a photo with our camera.