Sumrio

Making Of 'It Comes a Time of Death' .............................................................................................................................. 1

1. Surface ...................................................................................................................................................................... 5
2. Grass .......................................................................................................................................................................... 5
3. Small Tree on the right .............................................................................................................................................. 6
3. King(cloth) ................................................................................................................................................................. 6
4. Big Tree ..................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Making the Background .............................................................................................................................................. 10

Making Of 'It Comes a Time of Death'

By Radoslav Zilinsky
Software used: 3ds Max


Hi, my name is Radoslav Zilinsky and my Internet nickname is radoxist. In this article, I would like to present to you
the process of making my picture "It comes a time of death".
I'm going to tell you how I proceeded with the creation, modelling, texturing and composition. I will also pay a closer
attention to some details which I find interesting.
One of the most important things for me is, to have a good foundation, on which I can base my image. As an
inspiration could serve a photo, nice picture or my own sketch. In this case, I was inspired by a small cover picture from
one of the RUNELORDS series book.
So let's begin with the creation of the picture. My very first step
during the creation was:

1. Camera placement
2. Modelling of basic composition(mass)
3. Scene lightning.

I find it very important to have this three steps at the beginning. It is
something like making foundations for a scene. It is important, because
everything that follows, will be affected by lightning and camera placement. It
basically means that from now on, I can model and design materials for exact
camera view and lightning. At this phase, I don't care how the model looks
when I'm rotating it in the viewport, but I put more emphasis on how it looks
from my camera view. The same applies to material design. Now it's time to
show you, how the picture looks in the first phase.


As you can see, the mass and the
objects are only roughly modelled, but they
are good enough to set 80% of the final
lighting. Basically, there are three lights in
the scene - on the right side there is one
small rectangular light with orange colour
and higher intensity and another much
bigger light with blue colour and lower
intensity on the left. The third sky dome
light of red colour and lower intensity is
oriented from right to left and its purpose is
to add an extra colour variation to the
picture. From now on, I will not move the
camera at all.
At this point, I would like to talk
about the chosen renderer and the method
of rendering.
As for the rendering, I have used
Vray renderer and as a method progressive
path tracing (PPT), which was ideal for this
picture. The reason for this is that in the
scene there are many objects with Vray
displacement, and this method handles
them very good, especially in combination
with object isolation (alt+Q). As a result,
material testing was very fast.
As an illustration, I rendered three
pictures (tests). All of them were done in 4-
5 minutes (and already in the first minute I
could see most of the details), which is a very good result especially when talking about rocks and trees taking into
consideration their detailed displacement. The rendering was with "Normal" Vray GI method (other than PPT), for
example IRR + light cache, would take much longer than PPT. Here are the above mentioned test pictures.



So now we have set the basics of the
picture so from now on I will describe the
phase in which I have started to substitute
objects for final models. For the latter I have
unwrapped and made the materials right away. I have split everything nicely into layers - great thing, especially if you have
a shortcut (I have shift+space), which helps you to open and close it.
As for the material tests, in most of the cases I have used camera view as I have already mentioned before.
Now lets talk about the individual objects in the scene.

1. Surface
Here I would like to tell you how I proceeded in the creation of the texture for the surface and show you this
texture as well. The whole diffuse texture was done from 5 different textures such as grass, earth, leaves etc. I loaded
them all into Photoshop and drew the whole texture mainly using the clone stamp, dodge and burn tools and with
different type of brushes and adjustments. From this diffuse texture, I made the displacement texture by desaturating it
and using the burn and dodge tools. I have also used different selections from the diffuse texture made with colour range
and than it was adjusted with brightness/contrast.
On the next picture you can see a little piece of this texture. The texture itself has 8000x8000pix resolution

2. Grass
For this I recommend my tutorial at (http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/grass_tut/grass_tut.php)
There are only two
differences. The first one
is that I used two kinds of
textures for grass.
I put them together from
Total Texture v10 cd. The
second difference is, that
it was not deleted with
the texture, but by hand
which is because it
wasn't such a large area
and I wanted to have it in
the exact position as I
wished.
3. Small Tree
on the right
Here I found an
interesting way on
placing the leaves on this
tree (I want to thank
bontakun, who helped
me with this). The
procedure is that you
make one leaf and then
place a point helper at
the bottom of its stem
and link it to the leaf.
Finally make a particle
flow exactly the way as it
is on the next picture.
You will see, that all the
leaves will be placed on
selected faces of "small
tree on the right" and
they will be
perpendicular to them.
3. King(cloth)
At the beginning
I made this cloth only
with diffuse and bump
map, but fortunately, my
friend Marek Denko
persuaded me to model
the whole cloth for which
I want to thank him.
It's very important to
have a good reference.
One of my references is
the next picture.



4. Big Tree
I wanted this main
tree to be really nice, and
therefore I have spent most of
my time creating it. The first
thing was that I took a pencil
and drew the tree in a way I
wanted it to look in the scene.
Than I scanned the picture in,
took it to Max, placed it on a
plane object and then place it
in the scene where I wanted
the tree to be. This sketch
worked as a blueprint for me -
but not for the front and side
view, but only for the camera
view! Generally speaking, I
modelled this tree, so that it
looked like the tree on the
sketch. During the modelling I
used two viewports -
perspective and camera view.
While creating the
texture, I had first spent a few
hours searching for interesting
shots and nice details of trees,
which I could use for the
texture. By doing this I found
very nice textures, from which
I chose the most beautiful one.



As you can see there are two kinds of moss and two kinds of bark. I find that getting a few references images
makes the job of painting the texture so much easier. Here are the textures also with the unwrap.




Here I would like to tell you how I made the displacement map, which I wanted to add as a line structure to the
tree. As it was quite difficult to draw it in the Photoshop, I did it the other way and I simply modelled it from a plane object
with a high number of faces by using paint deformation in editable poly. I did it three times on three different planes with
different brush sizes and strengths. You can see something similar on the next picture (image a).
Further on, I transformed this model into a 2d displacement map. I did it by rendering a z-depth map from the top
view to this object. So it became a map which I have then used to displace some parts of the tree. Here is the rendered z-
depth map (image b).

image a


image b

I made the long leaves with standard max hair and fur which was causing me a headache:) I had to redo them 4
times until I was fully satisfied. The small leaves were done with the same method as the small tree on the right.
When it was nearly finished, I rendered it out and connected it in Photoshop. This was just to check the composition again.
After I checked it I decided, that it would be cool to have some darker bushes in the foreground to lead the viewer's eye
into the scene. So I drew the shape directly on the picture in PS and then modelled the bushes from this. The last step was
the creation of background and post production
Making the Background
I spent some time searching on the Internet for nice skies and mountains. The final background is a composition
of 5 different pictures. There was then added, a volume light and colour correction in the post production and final picture
was done:)