The Making OF | Shapes At The Park

Shapes At The Park | 2018

Hi everyone, before I get started I would like to introduce myself:
I am Vittorio Bonapace. I've recently been Art Director at Cityscape Digital in London and I am currently Creative/Art Director at my Vittorio Bonapace Studio and Senior Visualization Artist at Cityscape Digital.

This image was my entry and then award winning image for the A Day in the City | 2018 Evermotion Challenge. 

I am going to start with a bit of concept I put together before doing the artwork, just to frame the general feeling and some poetry about the image.

A calm dawn to connect nature, humans and architecture. Mysterious and safe at same time. Warm feelings on a freezing day.
We look through timeless patterns chasing dreams and beauty.

This is something that I usually do. Writing down a few lines about the feelings I want to express with my visual always help me in the beginning of the process. If I've got something on a paper and I am about to start looking for references and ideas, I find the research process quicker and I can easily create the imagery connected to my idea. In my opinion I find that at the first stage it's all about a clear vision, a focus and a story. If I approach the process with a strong base concept structure I will develop a strong concept as well.
 
My first idea came out while I was looking for a winter park reference image and I found this interesting photograph. Probably the muted and almost white palette got my attention. Even the little birds on the foreground gave me some composition ideas.

I've continued researching specific references to complete the winter mood I was thinking about. This is always very important to me, because I am about to create a bridge between my mind, my ideas and the final outcome I want to reach. 
My idea was to create an image able to connect Architecture to public realm, able to express either cold and warm feelings at same time. 
I found out that the answer was a freezing atmosphere of a park warmed up with a golden low sun touching in a delicate way the building facade and with people activity happening in the foreground. 

Then I decided to give a bit of story and focus to the visual and after a few test I found that a kid with a kite could have been an original and nice story element to add.

This is the mood board I've created before sketching something on a paper. And if I stretch my eyes I can see the final image look and feel.

I collected all the images in a single file for a reason. I usually print mood boards and references out in order to have my imagery close to my attention during the whole process. In my opinion this is very important because this allows me to keep my mood and concept in my mind and not take other directions during the workflow. 
One image is to express the winter feeling, another one expresses the sun glare effect I've wanted to achieve and a few more to tell about safe and warm feeling in the general cold atmosphere. 

Then I sketched in an easy and constructive way the image. I was on a tube and I just sketched a few thumbnails. When I was happy with one of those I blocked shapes and composition, keeping in mind all of the above about the story.

That's the image.

As I came back home I've modeled from scratch a few buildings and I've comped the shapes together like a collage in Psd. Of course I  added painting and fog on top to have the clear direction and see if this would have worked or not.
From this moment on I know exactly where I am going and I know that the image will come out smoothly.
 
Here the preliminary mood draft:   

I've added the sketch image in 3ds Max background to have the proportions and I have created the volumes of the buildings, the street and the edge profile of the lake. 

The furnishings have been modeled and added following my camera position. I used X-ref and a tidy layer structure to manage in the best way possible the file.
I kept every single floor on a separate x-ref, to work it easily. I just kept lighting on the main file to quickly adjust and manage lighting structure and do fast lighting tests.   

The general lighting has been created using an HDRI into the v-ray dome. Here some screengrabs of my lighting hierarchy.

The snow is a  quite simple VrayMtl. I made this choice because of my distance from the ground level. In this specific case, since I didn’t need any detail at all, I was happy with a middle gray material. I spent more time modeling the snow mesh in order to have clear dark shades.   

I've roughly modeled the shape from the scratch. Following the sketch in the viewport background I've moved some vertex first and I used the Populate Terrain plugin to split the mesh into polygons. Then I sculpted with the 3dsMax free form tool to start giving movement to the surface and I added a series of modifiers.

Displacement: I refined the maps in Photoshop. For the general mesh movement I used simple noise maps.

Once I've rendered my scene it was fundamental to have all the render elements required to comp in Photoshop and I've started my post production. 
Following here the steps before and after the postproduction.
Raw render: 

And the final image:

I've started picking up some geometry and defining better the shapes, with curves. Separately, I rendered the lake with a different material from the original max scene, just to have more information to composite my image.   

I've added a z-depth map to define my main shape building from the background.   

Added a few passes to make the glass more vibrant (vray_reflection, vray_raw_reflections, vray_refraction, vray_extratext, to create occlusions)

At this point I've started work with Vray_raw_lighting pass, light select passes and Psd free painting to give life to the building.

I refined glass reflections, painting people reflections - starting from vray_raw_lighting pass - and painted light touches everywhere.

Here is my final grade on the image, and following after this some cropped close ups to show details on it.

Hope you enjoyed this making-of!