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Visualizee technical details

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VisuAlizée: technical details

The shoe

The shoe [7 September 2005, 21:04]The shoe was the first modeled object from the entire project. It was also the first object I modeled using the box modeling technique. With this object I learned the basics of this technique, so it took me one week to model it. The fact that I had to study the real shoe, by observing it in the videos and in the photos I had, contributed to the difficulty of modeling it.

The rose-angel

Rose angel wings - wip 9 [4 April 2007, 22:20] Modeling this creature was quite interesting. As one may notice throughout my WIP images, I had many versions of its wings. Being the center of the image and the subject of the entire project, I was really picky about it. Based on suggestions from different individuals, I remodeled the wings several times. At the end, I decided to stop reaching perfection and I sculpted the wings one can see in the final render.

The final wings were textured with Bodypaint.

The birds

The bird [3 August 2006, 20:52] These birds are really far in the background, thus the simplicity of their modeling is obvious. But one can't know that the Photoshop painted textures were mapped onto the objects in a way one wouldn't expect. At that given time, I didn't have knowledge of Bodypaint and no clue on dealing with UVs. Thus, I manually mapped multiple materials on the object using the predefined projection modes, huh.

The grasshopper

The grasshopper [11 February 2007, 20:26] Due to lack of rigging knowledge, this creature was modeled in the exact desired pose. The modeling itself is not of very high quality due to my intention to keep it simple, as it was meant to be in the background. I haven't done any studies in regards to anatomy, as it would have been required for a correctly detailed grasshopper.

To texture the creature I used for the first time Bodypaint and I learned to play with UVs. The painted textures are at a very high resolution (over 5000x). After the pleasing experience of painting in 3D, all the objects I've done after this one, were painted this way. At first, dealing with UVs wasn't easy, but after a while I got used to them.

The butterflies

One of my butterflies [13 August 2006, 18:49]Maybe these were the most enjoying and creative thing I've done in part 1 of the image. The modeling of these butterflies was, obviously simple, but the texturing wasn't so simple. I learned to use Photoshop even further. For the first time I used on a daily basis the Paths tool. All the designs were manually drawn in it and colored afterwards. Each wing texture has a resolution of 1024x768 or higher. In the WIP images, you'll see that in 3D, I made their wings look like fabrics.

The flowers

A flower [11 February 2007, 20:58]Without any doubt, doing the flowers was a fun thing. I enjoyed the techniques I used for modeling and texturing them. I've learned to use xFrog extensively after trying various ways to make plants. Most of the textures are shaders, with few exceptions, which are Photoshop bitmap textures.

Trees and vegetation

VisuAlizée prefinal step3 wip6 [30 July 2006, 20:10] Everything was done using xFrog. For all of the plants, I created different shaders to texture them. No bitmapped images were used. Of course, it was a true pleasure toying with the shaders and trying to achieve good results. On the boring side of things... I had to manually distribute them, one by one. And to the extreme, I had to manually move the grass blades intersecting with other objects.

Scene management and related gimmicks

VisuAlizée prefinal step2 wip1 [19 July 2006, 12:02] As always, when I do a 3D scene, I start by modeling and composing it. For the entire project, I did the same.

Due to the very high amount of polygons, the scene was really hard to work with, thus texturing and lighting it would have been nothing but a hurdle. It was the first time when I applied the technique of breaking apart a scene into layers, into smaller scenes. So, I ended up having 6 scenes. Having a big 3D scene split like this, also increases productivity and overall quality of your final product by allowing your to better concentrate on the smaller parts of it.

The layers of the image:

Everything went smooth. All layers were rendered as HDRIs. The only show-stopper, technically speaking, was the water I had in the 5th scene. Obviously, when rendering... nothing was being reflected in it. So, after tons of brainstorming, I had to render the reflections for each layer and then compose the images into Photoshop. The reflections were all rendered as HDRIs, of course, at a resolution of the final render: 2756x3528. The final reflection map (in .PSD format) had 660mb. This was projected frontally to the camera view.

If you are asking why is the water too dark... or too blurry: that's done on purpose. My idea was that the image was already cheerful and chockfull of elements, thus I blurred and dimmed the water. Having the water purely reflecting everything would have looked bad.

The final render

VisuAlizée v2 - Blacklicht [13 April 2007, 11:51] All layers were rendered with Anti-Alias.

I've rendered the mask of the 6 layers and different depth-maps. These were my main "tools" for post-processing the entire image. As you may have seen, all the variations of this image were obtained in this way. I enjoyed doing them. I worked in RGB 8bits mode, but dithering errors were too obvious, thus I had to "render" them in 16bits mode. The .PSD file has 600mb.

Scene statistics

VisuAlizée - final OpenGL wireframe [3 May 2007, 22:22]

Technologies and techniques used

In my initial plans, I was thinking of Global Illumination and Motion Blur. Due to lack of CPU horse power these plans were cancelled.

Approximate render times:

The first four layers were rendered in November 2006 in a week or two. The last two renders were done in May 2007.

Attention: The render times aren't exact due to lack of interest in them and due to the very long period of work on the entire project. The resolution of the renders is: 2756x3528 pixels.

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