Great little clip with, I assume, After Effects motion graphics over the top. Lovely idea!
“This video was created for the Earth Day. A ode to the work of Jacques Languirand. The video will take part of the Globo Logos event that will take place in differents festivals all around the world.”
Globo Logos from Julien Vallée on Vimeo.
This mega intro of plush 2D and 3D wonderland was done by Gorillaz animator Pete Candeland of Passion Pictures. Very nice indeed!
Being an academic at heart I thought I could put pen to paper, so to speak, and share how we made these images. The image I’ll talk about is the St Pauls image as this is the image I’ve spent the most time with, in fact about 100 hours all up.
Of course credit goes out to the talented Squint Opera team, in this case Nick Taylor, Nic Hamilton and Kuba Roth who worked on these images also. (check out the other images here: www.jamesshaw.co.nz/blog/?p=140)
MODELLING
The only thing that isn’t modelled in this image is of course the picture of Chris jumping off the Whispering Gallery. So to start with a model like this you need to do some research. Most of the research was done off the web, but it is difficult finding resources on a building like this (believe it or not) as most of the drawings are very old, non-electronic and/ or in books. However there are always sources out there and within a day we had a good pool of information including the all important sections.
The modelling was done in 3ds Max and rendered in VRay. Reference images were inserted to scale and then traced in section and all elements either lathed (revolved) or copied around the origin point (0,0,0) which of course makes it a lot easier to repeatedly copy elements.
TEXTURING
Almost all of the textures used in this model are custom made. The easiest way of making these is screen grabs of sections and then using the dividion of geometry to paint bitmap images together. As this screen grab is just a reference I upscaled these to a decent resolution of about 4-6k to handle the final output of 6k to print. This is important as without this, in the final print your textures themselves will look pixellated depending on what you’re painting of course.
In photoshop I used a combination of custom masks and mold/ rundown textures to form the diffuse channels, another layer group to form the bump and specular and yet another black and white map to make a custom displacement map to use with vray displacement.
ceiling tiles across underside of arch. Tiled more accurately using unwrapUVW
main wall diffuse (RGB) channel
main wall bump map
main wall specular
gold band displacement
Arches panel diffuse (RGB) map
Arches panel displacement
ceiling diffuse with simple paint peeling bump
I tried at various stages to use procedural textures, but they just look too clinical and patterned. The vray dirt texture can be used in a blend material in the mask channel for instance to get mold in cracks (see first coat material in image below), or a paint splats mask used to give general mold stains (2nd coat in image below), but it is sometimes quicker to do this in Photoshop.
I’ve had this debate with my workmates Nic and Nick about procedural vs bitmap, and I used to be a procedural fan but now seem to be converted, simply because of the specific control you have over them in Pshop. For this random flakes of gold texture though it worked well.
Needless to say a lot of time was spend flicking between Photoshop and Max to get the correct look.
RENDERING VRAY PASSES
We used to output just the basic render and then work on that in Photoshop for stills. The only problem with that is a lot of time is spent masking things for adjustment layers etc; so why not use the outputs in the many render elements through vray.
In the Vray rendering dialog box goto render elements and add whatever you need. Personally I generally add lighting, shadows, gi, bump normals and a couple of extratex, which is something new and very useful in the latest version of vray. So not only do you get Vray rendering the “beauty” pass but you also get all the aforementioned outputted to the same directory. The following are examples of the extra passes you get in checking this:
Bump normals on left can allow you to use the RGB channels to cast light in post through a program like fusion- very cool!
ExtraTex can be used with Vray Dirt texture to give similiar to ambient occulsion pass
Global Illumination passes can be used to lighten dark areas
Lighting pass can be used to boost lighting. Normal and raw passes are shown here
Shadow passes, normal and raw respectively. I usually invert these in Pshop and use as a multiply or screen. Add a black mask to these layers and then you can white brush in shadows. A lot more accurate than freehanding it.
Reflection and Specular passes can be used to boost both, or cancel them out depending on the blend mode you use. Subtle differences, but these little bits really add to an image.
This is again an ExtraTex pass with falloff in the material slot. If you set it to a distance blend you get a way better result than the standard zdepth through vray. You can use this for huge amounts of stuff including lens blur, fog and lighting gradients.
These can be used in Photoshop using different blending modes, mostly screen, multiple and linear dodge quite easily. Or you can use the RGB values to mask areas for adjustment layers etc.
Ultimate control over your images/ animations!
RENDERING OTHER PASSES
Of course VRay cannot do all the passes present in this render alone. The light rays and windows presented special problems. The windows were easier to do in a seperate file, and this had the added bonus of controlling exposure with the vray physcial camera, as a photo taken inside a space like this would just show the windows as white not as they are in the final.
As a side note the windows were smashed with an excellent plugin called rayfire (www.mirvadim.com) which uses the very un-user friendly reactor within max (physical dynamics simulations) and gives it a brilliant one that easily accesses these features and adds a few more. Select, smash randomly, and smash parts again and hey presto, done. Or almost that easy.
Light rays, or volume light are still not supported by VRay so these were done in a seperate file using a standard directional light with volume lighting set to very high quality. Fairly quick to render as you don’t need any gi for this.
PHOTOSHOP OR POST PRODUCTION
As previously mentioned the beauty pass (standard pass out of rendering) is first with all the above passes on top with blend modes set to various screen, multiply etc depending on what they are and what works best. Personally I then add masks to these so I can add and take away the effect of these layers.
Fog is added with a solid colour with a copy of the zdepth alpha used as the layer mask. Cheers to Kristian for that tip!
Other elements that were too difficult or time consuming to model were added in Photoshop as you can see in the video below.
I generally use many sets of curves that can adjust colour and overall RGB intensities on each element. Curves are amazingly versatile for this. If you pull the levels right down or up you can then use this to paint shadows and highlights using it’s mask.
THOUGHTS
So that’s it. If you have any thoughts or questions feel free to comment below and I’ll try my best to answer. Happy modelling!
Here are the five images we have just completed for the “Flooded London” Exhibition. I am hoping to get the making of and a few notes behind these shortly. It is part of London Architecture week and explores the concept of a Flooded London many years after the event in 2090.
Squint Opera depicts living in ‘Flooded London’ in 2090
There will be an evening event held at Medcalf Gallery with Squint/opera on Fri 20th July 08 or Wed 25th July 08 to celebrate the exhibition (please contact Squint to confirm this date www.squintopera.com), and is being shown for one month after. www.lfa2008.com
The exhibition is listed in the events section on the LFA web site (www.lfa2008.org) at the top of events for July.
Flooded London exhibition is held at Medcalf Gallery in Clerkenwell presenting a series of images depicting Squint Opera’s long-term view of how London’s population has adapted to raised sea levels. The general scenario is set 80 or so years into the future, long after the sea levels have risen. The catastrophe side of the sea coming in has long since past and the five images are snapshots of people going about their lives, long since having adapted to the worlds new circumstance. The scenes shown through light boxes present London as a tranquil utopia with the architecture of the distant rat race suspended below the water.
The people in each scene appear to be relaxed and happy in their environment and in the first we see a man who has rowed into St Pauls and is preparing to dive off the ledge of the whispering gallery into the dimly lit ‘swimming pool’. Another sees the upper reaches of a once famous art gallery where people have collected pre flood artifacts and are rigging them up to get makeshift machinery going to power a light bulb. We assume that the world is a much less complicated and that there is not much in the way of industrialized manufacture. The original City is shown as the now abandoned Canary Wharf where two women are fishing out of the side of an office and the sail of a boat going down the street.
The installations are optimistic and reveal that far from being a tragedy, the floods have brought about a much-improved way of life to the capital city.
Squint has used photography, 3d modelling and digital manipulation to imitate some of the techniques of the super-idealistic Victorian landscape painters. Details are exaggerated and play with scale to present images that belie their composition.
St Pauls- A late afternoon plunge from the Whispering Gallery
Gallery- Resurrection experiments
Canary Wharf- Day in town for a spot of fishing
Honor Oak- Suburban Bucolia
St Mary Woolnath- Rich Pickings from Bank
Presentation for a sustainable housing development. Use of digital tools and physical modelling towards conveying urban design ideas.
This was part of a marketing campaign for Sphera Optical Networks, New York, United States. During my time in New York I was employed under Sphera as a Marketing Consultant making all marketing material through Photoshop and designing an intranet interface for their internal use.