ayahhanda

Making of "Sunrise in venise"

Carlos Serrano has written us the 'making of' about his wonderfully atmospheric image creation 'Sunrise in Venise'. Read on to discover more about the creation process beind this great image ...

Composition.

When I began to make this image, I first of all needed to check some Venice reference images, to see what type of buildings & colors exist in Venice. I wanted something that gives a good feeling, a good ambient. So I thought that a morning ambient scene would be perfect, with a little fog and warm sun. I played around alot with the shadows, I wanted to make them an important part of the composition. There's no casual shadows, I placed the elements accordingly to play with light and shadows. I preferred to give soft colours to everything, mainly green and orange. I used blue ONLY for the sky. The ambient light would be very important. The water has a green colour, to give it dirty appearance, and also it was one of the main colours I had chosen to use. Click for full image !

I began with some boxes to place the buildings. Without details, just the main elements. Then I placed the camera, until I found the perspective I was looking for.

Architectural Elements.

The windows were done using booleans. I did the window parts and walls with charmfer boxes. The cornices below windows were extruded splines. The column cylinders and balconies are renderable splines. The street lights were modeled using splines to give the shape, and then extruding them with a small amount of bevel deformation.

Details.

The wall where the plants are is a spline extruded vertically. I simply used a patch grid, to make the water. The chain links were made one by one, and then put together to form a whole. Each link is a loft with an ellipse for the path and a circle as the lofted shape. The plants are patches that are deformed to give a leaf appearance. The railings are cylinders, and the rounded upper parts were created using a profile lathed 360º.
Here's the finished model of the scene.

Lighting.

The purpose was to give a morning look, with warm tones, and no areasof darkness. I used one direct light to simulate the sun and put it
in a low position. The skylight was tinted blue, slightly dark and intense, to be present all
over the image. There's another light in the scene to create soft caustics over the wall
with the plants. It gives a touch of detail that I like. The main light uses a vrayshadow plane, with a fairly big size to make the object shadows a bit softer against the walls.

Light settings

To set up the lighting, I used a vraymat grey material for all the elements (before applying textures & colours). This way I could test different light settings, with fast rendering and it shows up the dark or clear areas better. To avoid surprises in texturing process with light. In some cases, like for the water, I changed the vray properties of the object to make it generate more GI. you can see the settings for the main light opposite.

Texturing.

I made the textures in Photoshop 7. The mapping of elements was done using unwrapp UVW and then painting in PS over the capture. In other cases I used a screen shot of the element, and afterwards painting it in PS. The materials are all vraymats. I always began with a difuse map, to give the aspect to texture, and to give the diffusion level by changing the luminosity of the bitmap. If a material reflects a little, I turn down the luminosity a little too. Most objects have only diffuse and bump maps. I used the 'phong' shader except for metals or similar, which are 'ward'.

&nbspWater settings	&nbspDiffuse map	&nbspMask
Materials. The water is a vraymat, with fresnel reflections and a diffuse map made by myself using a mask. The bump is a mix of 2 noise maps, one bigger than the other, using a smoke map as a mask. The The railings have slight glossy reflections.

	Rendering. I rendered with vray at 1800x 2400, using the catmull-rom antialiasing filter. Then I added some fog in PS postproduction. below are the vray settings. See the final render at 1024x 768 resolution opposite.