CGSociety

Floating Drydock 1943 continued...

Modeling

The modeling part was quite basic. Most of the structures are elaborated primitives. The water in front of the drydock is a flat plane displaced with a noise map. The carrier was the most challenging part to model, being created by box-modeling and subdivision surface editing, with all the detaching panels placed carefully over it. The cranes and truck are some previous models I made for this project, while the people are a mix of pictures mapped on flat polygons and realtime models made for the project by another Code Guardian artist, Giovanni Bianchin.

Of course the detail of the whole elements was finalized and focused only on the camera shots, and some elements are invented and probably not very historically accurate.

The real challenge was to deal with the poly count; to optimize here and there to prevent the scene collapsing in the viewport, and to make all sort of nasty details with a limited number of polygons. In spite of this effort to keep the scene optimal, the whole scene took almost 6 million polygons in rendering.

Floating Drydock 1943 continued...

Texturing

This was the most challenging and time-consuming task because I carried out many trials and experiments to get the correct mood of the textures. It also took a lot of time because the textures were quite large, the bigger ones reaching 4096x4096 pixels.

Most of the textures made for this project were made by retouching and painting over existing photorealistic textures (thanks to 3D Total for the nice 3D Total texture collection used extensively in this project). I usually then arranged my PSD files in catalogued folders including one for ‘rust layers', one of the diffused dirt, one for the hue and saturation color corrections and so on. This way I could easily experiment with them, turning them on and off and playing with layer fusion modes of entire folders. Of course, I could also drag and drop them from one PSD files to another in an easy and practiced way.

Just think how useful it can be to simply drag entire rust layer folders to have the same rusty mood from 2 different metal textures files… Or imagine the importance of building a folder containing the color adjustments layers for specular and glossiness maps and then being able to simply drag it from one PSD file to another to share the same shininess map settings.

Most of the materials are standard max materials with Blinn shader, except the water material which is a glass material from Brazil modified slightly.

Some other elements use Darktree's Simbiont procedural shaders. These were really useful for very rusted metallic surfaces such as the frontal gate.

Lighting and rendering

Although the animation will be rendered in Scanline render (as the whole project), this still was rendered in Brazil r/s 1.2.

The daylight scene uses one yellowish max standard target direct light casting bluish shadow maps, a Brazil skylight, and indirect illumination with one bounce.

The complete rendering and lighting setup (click to enlarge):

The aliasing filter is Catmull Rom type. I love the sharp and neat quality it produces, although in some cases it can generate aliasing problems.

After the straight render in 3ds max which took about 45 minutes, the scene was processed in Photoshop in order to fine-tune the hue and saturation of some areas, furthering increase edge sharpening, add a subtle depth fading effect, and of course composite in the sky and the background picture.

System configuration
Pentium 4 3GHz, 1GB RAM
Geforce Ti 4600

Software
3ds max 5.2, Photoshop

Related Links
Alessandro Baldasseroni 's website
Code Guardian trailers
Download large image: 1280 x 960 | 1576 x 760

Words by Alessandro Baldasseroni, Lisa Thurston & Marco Spitoni
Images © Alessandro Baldasseroni