Back in September 2019, I came across an advertisement for a snow resort in the depths of Lapland. I was amazed by the concept of observing northern lights, or as they also know “Aurora Borealis” in specially equipped glass igloos and caught fire with the idea of making my own interpretation of this kind of recreation, besides I had little experience in creating large landscape environments, so it’s time for Bob Ross style. 

You could say that I have stuffed a lot of bumps in the course of this work. The main difficulties I encountered were snow materials, the image of the aurora itself by means of 3ds max, managing large environments as well as the need to get the final image in 8K resolution for future purposes. It so happened that this project I was engaged in from time to time and what began in autumn, lasted more than six months. During this time I managed to make a project for which also had to work with snow, which led me to the decision to finish this work.

The auroras proved to be quite a non-trivial task, given their methods of origin, the height at which they arise, and their overall impact on the lighting of the environment.
I didn’t really want to do them on the post, because it wouldn’t help me with the self-education that I always try to follow.
It turned out that there weren’t too many methods and lessons to create these things freely available. Various methods have been tried, ranging from splines with noises on top of them to particle simulation. The latter was the most physically correct but consumed an unreasonable amount of resources that I don’t have.

In the same way, I had to optimize the resources of the scene by assembling the final renderer of several, splitting the scene into the background, middle and foreground, as well as the main one, both to save memory and because of the limitations of the Corona Renderer on the rendering air perspective. I guess after all this, I’ll probably do some making off of how I did this project because there’s more to share on the way to the finals.

Because of the latest events in the world, it was doubly nice to try to depict what we are now deprived of. Outdoor walks, freedom to travel and the simple joy of natural phenomena.
I hope that by looking at this render you can, even if you are at home, feel the comfort, majesty of nature and clean winter air, which I tried to convey.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the project of reconstruction of the local city square. And if the other renders which were made are mostly technical, with this one I decided to show upcoming New Year feel. Always wanted to create a snowy scene, but as you can see there isn’t much snow, heh. But I definitely do more in the upcoming projects, because why then I spend so many hours for setting up snow shader 😀

When I was a kid, here, in Russia, we had computer clubs, where you can play games that not run on your PC (If you’re lucky to have one), and, especially, GTA Vice City. It’ll be always something for me in terms of what you can do in games, how it can look, and sounds.

Going back to the clubs, due time limit that you can play on rented PC, mostly saved files were in one place at the start of the game, which was this Ocean View hotel, so its appearance forever imprinted in my memory.

Eventually, I received an architectural education, learned that the style in which the hotel was built as a reference is called Art-Deco, and becoming a visualizer for some years decided that it’s a good occasion to remember old times, to distract from work projects and try to convey the atmosphere, and how it seemed this building in my imagination.

For a basis, I, as well as the developers at Rockstar took real hotel Clevelander, with a little of diversion. Since the real hotel got a modern extension wing, I decided that it would be logical to reflect this element in my version of Ocean View, so now instead of a blank wall of the side facade, there is another entrance and a console ledge with panoramic windows.

A set of images based on the model of an apartment house in France,
provided within the learning course of architectural visualization studio. The main task of course was to transfer four different lighting conditions. Unfortunately, as often happens, not all ideas came to be realized because of limited resources but it was a good way to practice