Stage two : assigning materials.

Continuing the previous project, we were to assign materials to our building and produce realistic renderings. Before I started, I added in the landscape and some missing details like the doors, windows and the skylight.

Door handle drawn using line and chamfer tool.

Landscape

How I did the landscape : Draw plane >edit poly > enable soft selection > paint brush > push pull. When done, I applied turbo smooth to get a nice smooth hill.

Time to assign materials. First, a series of maps needed for the materials are prepared. I photoshop-ed all the materials before hand just so it looks more realistic.

Material mapped on object and adjusted with UVW map so it fits nicely.

 After all materials are assigned, the sun and cameras are added. Test rendering are conducted ALL THE TIME to make justifications. Especially at times when I want to cast the perfect shadow, I had to keep moving the sun and test render until I get the perfect angle.

Artificial lightings are added in after that. Models of spotlights, ground lights are imported, merged into my max file and placed respectively. Artificial lighting requires lots of test renders too because there are so many lights to choose from and test rendering is needed to pick out the perfect light to suit the building and overall atmosphere.

However for test render I reused the final gather for small images (320x200), just so the calculation step is skipped and the render time is decreased. Here are some test render images :

Wanted the sunlight to be casted on the floor through the skylight but it is casted on the wall instead. HAD TO MOVE THE SUN AGAIN ! Trust me, it's like playing hide and seek with the sun.

Upon satisfaction for the test render, it's time for the real rendering. I turned off the <reuse final gather> and I set the final gather to high just so more details are captured nicely. The image size is then set to 1200x900. One render took about 20-30 minutes, so while waiting, I touched up the rendered images with photoshop. Levels, colours and so on are adjusted to enhance the photo.

Yeap, basically these are the procedures and as for final renders, it will be in the next post~ :)