When the shading stage arrives I always think about what are the most important materials of the image so I can focus my efforts on them.

In this case, in order of importance, the wooden planks of the museum facade would be first. Closely followed by the soil and the foreground vegetation. In the last position we have the white plaster and the concrete that dress the restaurant.

To create these materials I used substance designer (all of them but the terrain shader that was done when modeling the environment). I wish I had known the existence of substance before. Incredible! It greatly shortens the process of creating materials by its real-time viewer and also makes very enjoyable and fast creating materials with it.

For the facade I had some textures that were almost perfect. The only problem were the wood knobs. I got rid of them via photoshop in no time and everything was ready to jump to substance. There I created the specular, glossy and normal maps from the diffuse. Once I had the node tree I replaced the original bitmap with the 11 different difuses and suddenly I had 11 full maps ready to load to multitexture to avoid repetition. (images 1 & 2)

For the vegetation I have used forest color. Also very powerful. I have used its function of taking values from a texture and “tinting” the elements (leaves) of these random values. That is, a good randomness in a single click. Magnificent.

To help set the mood of the image I have resorted to several free 3d models that I have textured very simply as they appear in third plane.

The summary of the shading phase would be: Substance designer, forest color and references, lots of them 🙂