If you missed it, here is the Making of the “Maison Hermès”.
Hi everyone, welcome to the Maison Hermès Making of.
It’s difficult for me writing this because I worked without saving step by step infos. All that I can show here is the workflow, models and how I get from the rendering to the final image. It could be not exhaustive but this is for the most part a painting job and it’s all about mixing channels.
Let’s start!
First of all, references! I can’t make an artwork (dedicated to our favourite architects) without photos. Famous buildings have something magic and I need to understand where I can play with colors and lights to recreate this magic. On the other side it’s a matter of respect for the architect, I can’t make a mistake on proportions or materials. After watching a lot of photos, from various angles and at different time of the day I had an idea for the artwork’s final mood.
Note all the important info, there’ll be guidelines for the postprocessing part.
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#2 Modelling
Modelling part was the easy one, just the 12.000+ glass-blocks give me a little problem. I made a single mesh for the structure merging the linear 42,8cm glass-block with the 21,4cm angular one. The glass is a unique spline extruded and mapped with a noise to reproduce the distortions. There’re 9-12 spot lights each floor, no HDRI, only a V-Ray sky with night settings. V-Ray lights are used on the slabs to improve the illumination. Street lights were made with a V-Ray light material. In the scene there’re a lot of cubes mapped with textures of building to add reflections.
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#3 Rendering
Software used: 3dsMax, V-Ray.
Render size is an A3 @300dpi so ~4960 x 3500 pixels.
Render time was ~4 hours on a Dual Xeon 5550, 16 cores.
Materials are very simple. I made 3 different type of glass, one for the main structure, one for other buildings and a last one for the mirror effect of the palace at left. Street and pavement mats have a falloff in reflection, no bumps except for the normal map of red bricks. Render Elements activated are raw-reflections, raw-refraction, diffuse and z-depth. Ambient occlusion: 2 passes, one fine with 40cm and one large with 500cm diameter. Just for fun, I rendered a pass of V-Ray sky with clouds… this is not really needed but give you some info about prospective for making background.
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#4 Postprocessing
Finally, the funniest part of the job!
Photoshop file is 1.8 GB with 500+ layers of post-production so I can’t show you every single paint. Here’s the key passages of the work.
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Base Render / Color correction
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Painting / Adding the sky
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Adding background, shops & car. people, lights and vegetation
More details
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Download here the materials for the Maison Hermès.
[button text=”Download Maison Hermès” color=”secondary” style=”gloss” size=”larger” link=”https://www.stateofartacademy.com/downloads/SOA_Maison_Simon.zip”]
