“Vale” has been an off and on personal project that I’ve been working on for a long time. The idea came to me out of nowhere one day and I decided I had to create it.
Nearly everything in the image is 3d. Only a few things like the river and waterfalls are composited from photos. The plants were all created using Onyx. The mountains in the background were displaced in max using hightfield maps created in World Machine. The cliff face with the ruins was poly modeled and displaced.
There is a short “making of” video at the link below which shows some wireframes, A compositing build up of passes and some closeups of the highres final image (1920x1080).
Heh, it was so long ago that I saw the wip that I don’t remember when that was
One thing that stands out to me is that the light seems a little cool on the right side of the image, with that sunset I would expect it to be warmer and for the orange to show up in some of the reflections/highlights.
DaForce>> The scene was lit mainly with Vray dome lights and direct lights. The ambient light passes were the dome light but also a very large dim area light to give the overall ambient light a little direction. The direction of the key light is totally cheated in every key pass. I pulled the key lights way off from where the sun “appears” to be to get the look I wanted.
jacksc02>> I used Digital Fusion to composite the passes. The flow got so big (and my computer is showing its age) that I had to break it into two separate files.
RErender>> Yeah that WIP I showed you was a LONG time ago…I was looking through my WIP images and the very first one was saved in July 2005. Its been hard to find time to work on it. Say hello to all the Focus crew for me!
great work Tim. I may have asked you this before, but how do you like working with vray, compared to Brazil, assuming your using Brazil alot there at Blur?
Percy>> I enjoy working with Vray, Brazil and Mental Ray. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but us Max users having so many options to get the job done is always a good thing. I mix the renderers all the time. Some passes with Vray, others with Brazil or MR. “Vale” here is all Vray and just a couple scanline passes. At work we mostly use Brazil, but like many studios we will use whatever tool does the job best.
Say hello to all the Focus crew for me!