Hi guys,

First of all I’d like to thank Jeff Mottle and CGarchitect for the opportunity to participate in the Making Of articles.
My name is Luis Cardoso and I’m a senior CG Artist at Assembly Studios (www.assemblystudios.co.uk) based in London.

The Summer Holiday Park is not a commercial image. It’s one of many case studies I produce to learn and test new settings and techniques. One of the challenges of this project was getting to setup a scene inspired in a place I’ve been on holidays with my familiy this summer, without any kind of photography support, reference, drawings, etc. Tough task as I had to trust on visual memory for the scale and details for modeling and textures.

Workflow

My workflow is usually the industry standard model: model, light and composition, texturing, render and post production.

The software I’ve used are: 3ds Max, V-Ray and Photoshop, but on this project i’ve also used Multiscatter for the vegetation.

Modeling

Having no drawings and measurements to start with, I’ve used the standard steps and standard door size as a starting point, and start building up the scene from there.

Things started to be a bit more interesting as model progressed, especially when I’ve started to model some of the details.

This is when I started to introduce the vegetation model into the scene with multiscatter, an amazing tool that kept me playing with the settings for a quite long time.

Light and Composition

Lighting and setting up the compositions is certainly one of my preferred stages in any project. I’ve started to place a camera in the scene and framed it in a way to get the door on the top right of the rule-of-the-thirds and also having diagonals created by the ceiling perspective and the foot path. The lighting was very simple. I’ve placed and perpendicular to the camera to get volume and contrast.

Materials and Texturing

The materials and textures used on this scene are very simple. Diffuse map plus a reflection map and a vrayedgestex on the bump slot to smooth the edges of the geometry.

Render Settings

I usually don’t use this render setting at work for production as it takes a lot of time to render. This was an opportunity to play around a bit with the settings. I normally use Irradiance and lightcache in GI settings

Post Production

I’ve rendered some elements and masks using multimatte elements for post in photoshop. I tend to use multimatte (RGB) more often as I can select color by channel in Photohop and get the masks also with antialising.

the final image after a few teaks in photoshop: