Fair warning, this will be a loooong post.
Ok, so at this stage, the roofs are done, the frames are decent, I’ve got a nice pool effect going – what needs sorted?
Basically, the grounds of the building – the paving, the lotus pool, the steps, the petal platform…a few things basically.
As it is, I tweaked with the paving material – lowering the tiling to make each tile easier to see, lightening it up, adding the bump map, bumping up reflection – generally making it look nicer. The paving material, being an Arroway texture, came with a bump map already which was really helpful. Gotta love Arroway.
The final paving tile material
Diffuse was a mix map – mixing with a pure white to brighten it up from the dull grey.
For the stairs, petal walls, and pool, I wanted a unified texture, preferably that of marble tiles – marble being a solid choice and fan favourite of religious and public buildings everywhere, as well as looking gorgeous when done right. It took a while to find a nice map to play with, but as usual, Arroway pulled through in their Stone: Volume One pack with a good marble tile texture.
The main values and appearance of the marble texture. On reflection, the bump could be higher – I was going for nice clean tiles, but still, they could do with more oomph.
The map slots – Arroway came with specular and gloss maps as well as bump!
If I did this again, I would spend more time on this final part of the project – whilst I ended up being very happy with the final result, I feel some of these materials are a little lacking in refinement. Anyhow, it’s a minor regret, all things considered. As it is, the marble turned out looking not too shabby.
The main roof metal material – also used on parts of the arched doorways (I added the tile effect from several posts ago to it as well).
If done again, I would’ve bumped up the strength of the bump map in Photoshop – even at 50.0 it can’t really be seen much in the renders
For the frame material, I used similar settings to those I used during the summer – a grey, moderately reflective Blinn:
Despite not having maps, this material is actually perfectly fine for purposes – the frames just needed more complexity on their model instead of being mostly flat. Minor complaint though.
With these materials done, the main materials were effectively sorted – I had to adjust the UV maps on the lotus pool to make the ridges of the tiles follow be perpendicular to the shape of the pool sensibly, but this was a pretty quick fix.
However on rendering I felt the foreground felt very bare and uninteresting. So I went back and yes, again, modelled.
In this case, my flatmate Harry (Dafereras – also on the course) suggested I add some grass to brighten things up a bit. Seeing as tried to have a clear nature-inspired (well, floral inspired anyway) theme in the various forms I’ve implemented, this made perfect sense – there absolutely should have been grass from the start.
I won’t spend much time talking about the modelling as I’ve covered my processes plenty on that front, but I’ll share some screenshots of the grass areas I modelled.
The grass areas – the front of which roughly adhere to the curves of the lotus pools, and allow plenty space (~2m) to move through
The grass areas with kerbing added
This, in combination with decreasing the resolution from 2000×1300 to 2000×1150, removed much of the unnecessarily large foreground and also made it much nicer to look at. This was finally a space that I could imagine people moving through – inhabiting.
There but one final task before rendering – adding a statue to the interior. I obviously did not have time to model one at this stage, so I sourced a wonderful free 3D scan from Sketchfab of the Buddha sitting on a huge ornamental lotus flower – appropriate, right? Geoffrey Marchal has a whole collection of similar 3D scanned statues and artifacts on his page – very cool stuff indeed. Generous guy as well, making all of this available to anyone.
The scanned model, imported into 3DS Max
If I had more time I could sort some of the messed up texturing (I have never used anything from Sketchfab before, so I’m sure there’s something I probably did wrong somewhere), but for the purposes it still looks fantastic.
The final in-3DS Max view for the final render – showing the Buddha statue inside the temple. In reality though, the actual final render I used had the statue at a larger scale.
And so, that brings this looong post to a close, and the majority of the project with it! In the next post, we’ll take a look at the final render I got.
Stuart McInnes 