LogIn3d artist Rafael Chies discussed the production of some of his beautiful little scene, inspired by Tom & Jerry and Rescue Rangers.
3d artist Rafael Chies discussed the production of some of his beautiful little scene, inspired by Tom & Jerry and Rescue Rangers.
Introduction
Rodent’s Car
Production
Actually that was one of the projects that come quickly and very clear on my mind. I started directly in Maya, I’ve used Zbrush only to sculpt the cobblestones and some parts of the environment. I did some rough and really simple blocking then went to Photoshop to paint over some insights to help me think about the elements that could be used to make a scrap car. Also this blocking helped me to plan the overall composition of the scene. After this step I went back to Maya and started to detail everything.
Materials
Substance Painter is making a revolution inside the industry, it is really powerful, quite straightforward and I simply love it but the quality of materials and details is much more related to the capacity of observing the real world rather than the technical capacity of the software. I always start researching. In this case I researched for items like sardine cans, collections of matchboxes, bottle caps, and so on.. It’s an awesome part of the project because this is very interesting, each item tells its own story through lots of minimal details and this is what we have to transmit to our scene.
I used the PBR MetalRough preset to export the textures and plugged them in various RedshiftMaterial inside Maya. Keep in mind to set the colorspace of the Roughness and Metallic map to RAW. Also change the fresnel type of the material to metalness.
Lighting
A) Main light: high-intensity cold light. Emits volume.
B) Dome light: medium-intensity warm custom HDRi, works as rim light and also helps to give more realism to the reflections and GI. Doesn’t emit volume.
C) Headlights: object light made from the christmas lamps interior, combined with two sphere lights to emit volume.
D) Two low-intensity warm lights to help the rim light.
E) Incandescence material from the vending machine.
Rendering
Working with Redshift is like a dream come true, it’s SO fast, you act almost like a photographer. You can get your work to a whole new level because you don’t waste time waiting for never-ending renders, you can try lots of setups, compositions, and shader tweaks in real time. It also helped me when I was planning the scene, as I didn’t had a concept, I was planning the light and mood while blocking the modeling. As it is this quick you can make thinks like DOF, chromatic aberration, fur and volume fog directly into the raw render, this way you don’t have too many work at the composition step. The renderer is really stable and works in a quite similar way to Vray, so it’s really friendly to new users.