Kalmar Museum of Art

Before get starting to work I’ve been thinking about the mood of the image. After long deliberations, I stopped on a gloomy mood which usually happens before the storm. Also a great influence on my choice had works of such masters as Bertrand Benoit and Alex Roman. Their works has always seemed to me gloomy and anxious. That is exactly what I find interesting about them.

After selecting the mood, I started to work. I decided that classical composition of frame is more suitable for such buildingand the building was placed in the center of the shot. In the work I tried to use the straight lines that accentuate the construct of the museum. I also thought that it is possible to add water to the image. It gives a nice reflections of the environment and makes the picture more interesting.

After the work has been completed, I saw that the render looks too gray and lifeless. For this I decided to add to the image a little bit of sunshine which gradually absorbs the stormy sky.

In the end I got an image which combines dark stormy mood with inherent cool shades and sun with its warm light.

Thank you for attention.

Tomorrow Challenge

From the start, I had in my mind the concept that the museum and the surroundings shall be a public space , where you can enjoy the Baltic sea view and spend free time with your friends.
The mood I chosen, was from the beginning the foggy autumn morning. The black facade can be better emphasized by yellowish nature.
I have enjoyed the challenge, and wish good luck too all of artists .

KK

First of all, I searched the internet thoroughly to get to know with the project. I picked my angle from where I thought the museum can be best captured, and right away I started modelling the parts visible to the camera.

I picked a frame where the museum is shown from medium distance and occupies only half of the photo in order to include its immediate surrounding in the capture as well.

I decided to try and represent the museum on a winter afternoon with snow, which seemed very interesting from the beginning knowing that the surrounding of the real museum is almost forest-like.

As far as the materials are concerned, the main thing was, of course, the facade material and its reflections. Since the museum is shown from a medium distance I had to enhance this material in post production. The same goes for most of the snow in the picture as well.

The software used in the making of this project were 3D Max, V-Ray, and Photoshop.

Museum in rainy day

Making-of video:
http://dl.vnplugin.com/vn/Downloads/makingof.mov

The main goal of simulation in this project is to make an angle look as exactly same as the reference photo. At the beginning, by using Camera Match, the camera was adapted to the desired angle. Also, it was done with the camera facing the front of the building in order to draw the correct volume without checking the plan of the building. After modeling the main parts of the building, the trees, floor and electricity pole were modelled.
To model the soil, meshing was increased and Displacement modifier was used. Then, ProOptimizer modifier was used to decrease the meshing. It will be lighter than the VrayDisplacement at the time of rendering.
For creating water cavities, a copy of ground was made and Relax modifier was used. After that by the help of Scanline, the Top view was rendered in Grayscale mode and then some changes were applied in the Photoshop.
PFSource was used to create the rain. Due to heavy rendering, plans with opacity were used, and to insure exact rendering, the amount of Max Transp. Level in VRay rendering was raised up to 200. The Spawn parameter was used for modeling the effect of raindrops hitting the walls, trees and the ground. Unfortunately, due to the large size of data, the collision effects were changed into polygon. Thus omission of Motion Blur at the time of render and slightly reducing the quality of the project.
Different modes of different particle types were used to create the effect of falling raindrops from the trees and the walls, but unfortunately none of them have the desired result. At last, they were modelled by Polygon and animated in different modes and using the PFSource they were put under the bottom of the objects in the scene.
Forest plugin was used to create grass. The mired grass in the water cavities were deleted.
For lighting, just one HDRI light with relatively low intensity was used. The same light with different angle was used to create the reflections. All of internal lights are VRay Plan Light.
ZDepth and ObjectID were used as render element. By using ZDepth some depth-of-fields was added to the scene and also it was used to create Fog. To choose different parts in Photoshop, the ObjectID element was used. But unfortunately, because of MotionBlure, it was not useful to choose the raindrops.

Final Image

I’ve really enjoyed working on this project – I’m used to doing mostly interior and product renders, but have always wanted to do much more exterior work, so this challenge seemed like a great opportunity to learn some new tricks. Working on the landscape elements has been great fun, and spending time getting the building exterior materials ‘just right’ has taught me lots too!
I set myself a strict time limit, and spent much more time experimenting with post production than I normally do. I’m pretty happy with the final image.
Thanks to Tomorrow and Ronen Bekerman for setting this challenge – it has been lots of fun!
Good luck everyone!

Cheers!