"tough love" - environment ../10.3
Favela, barrio, ghetto, 'hood - a place you could call home
After playing around with a variety of compositions, we settled on a close crop of our protagonists against their natural environment. This gave us lots of scope for background detail while still making the piece achievable in the time we had allotted for this internal project.
We dug around in our reference library to explore a gritty, distressed urban fabric, and the bright graphic elements with which a faded consumer society would once have adorned this environment. Graffiti, posters, tags, filth and fury - delightful.
We initially white-boxed the scene in 3dsmax, using placeholder objects to establish camera and object placement. When a direction became clear, we were in a good position to take the basic geometry a step or two further before using it as a basis for reassembling the scene in Zbrush.
We've had a lot of success using sculpted 'digital maquettes' for character development : the immediate visual feedback and short iteration times mean this method is a great way to start injecting detail and mood at an early stage. This project was the perfect opportunity to expand this process for environment assets.
As our sculpts progressed, we made much use of Zbrush's ability to work on low subdivision levels externally and re-apply high level detail. Non-destructive tweaks to underlying topology and UV-maps are essential when preparing sculpts for clean texture extraction and practical use in renders.
We brought meshes back into 3dsmax at a variety of resolutions, baking out bump and displacement maps for the more visually important elements.
When it comes to shaders we use whatever tricks and techniques we know to produce a good result, then optimise the network and its textures to keep both the scene and render times manageable. Textures were created from a combination of photographs and hand-drawn elements, layered with baked cavity maps and a lot of good old-fashioned grunge.
In addition to 3dsmax, we use a variety of tools for UV mapping and shader development. For more detail on these have a look at our tools page over here.
The result was a rich and stylised setting for our scene, full of juicy detail but light enough for easy manipulation and quick renders.
