Making of Stavia Competition

A new "Making Of" by Gilberto Bonelli from Paris, France. Check out his original image posting here.

Hi all, thank you for this amazing opportunity to share my work.

In this article I’ll describe the "making of" for the image I created for the Stavia competition project
in January 2012. Due to the conditions of the project I was obliged to produce the scene under a tight deadline and with the possibility of changes in the project the project.

+ aa and Francois Zab provided the mass modeling.

MODELING
I modeled the project with Rhinoceros taking particular care with the layer subdivision to simplify the rendering process with 3ds Max or C4D. For this project I used 3ds Max.

Working with 3ds Max I usually export my files in .DWG format, importing them one layer at a time. It’s quite a strange way to work but in my opinion there is nothing better for modeling than Rhino and it's also a force of habit.

Here are a few screenshots of the base model:

MODEL RENDERING

My scene in 3ds Max is really simple, in this case I decided to give most of my attention to the post-production in Photoshop. This choice was due to the lack of details and lack of time.

I rendered my scene in V-Ray, but did not have many materials in the project. I worked on three different types of glass with different reflective properties, a basic texture for the planted roof, and a generic concrete for the interiors and the harbour floor.

I tried a mutiscatter for the grass at the very beginning but the distance from the building and the freedom that I wanted to keep in post-production led me to a more basic solution.

LIGHTING

As I only wanted a good base for post-production and the objective was a dusk shot, I rendered my scene using a really low V-Ray sun and a light dome mapped with a dusk/dark HDRI to create nice reflections on the facade.

Gamma correction was enabled at 2.2 and 1 in 3ds Max and again 2.2 output in the V-Ray color mapping setting.

Here you can see the base rendering. I also rendered a version without the facade for each project:

PHOTOSHOP

Here we are in front of this empty image. I started with some adjustments to the light and color balance to give a clear path to the process.

Now the fun part begins - adding life. Furniture, ambient light and environment to the image.

It’s very important to find the good photos but sometimes it's really stressful. For this project is was really difficult to find entourage imagery that matched the perspective of the harbour.

To complete the scene I adjusted the lighting effects added some sharpening and the missing details to give the scene more balance.

The final result:

I hope you enjoyed reading my article and that I was clear enough to inspire you something.
Don’t hesitate to ask and comment.

Thank you all
Gilberto