I was inspired by the Grieghallen tutorial by Tamas Medve (featured a long time ago on the blog) to try my hand at making his wet stone pavers before the competition was ever announced.

When the competition started, I figured it would be a good opportunity to both add to my portfolio while also testing the pavers in a full scene.

My computer at home is quite old and as such it really can’t handle large expansive scenes, or scenes with a lot of assets or accessories so I had to be clever about chosing my camera angle. Luckily I found a reference photo of the building online which I used as my inspiration. The angle is suitably dramatic and also limits the amount of background scenery I would have to build, allowing me to focus on the lighting and materials and not worry about my computer dying!

The scene itself is fairly straightforward spline modeling for the most part. The pavers out the front are a simple texture with a custom displacement as in Tamas’ tutorial – with a plane of water put on top to simulate the puddles. The background (and the reflection in the windows) are free building models downloaded from 3dsky.org and most of the textures came from my own personal library, Arroway or Textures.com. The background trees are a simple forestpack with some zDepth applied in post production. I made extensive use of the Corona Light Mix as it allowed me to leave my computer render the scene out once (as it took forever on my old machine) and then tweak the lighting afterwards to get it looking how I wanted. I don’t think I would have had the time otherwise to adjust the lighting in the short amount of time I spent on the project (overall I think it was 3 days after work).