305 Kern St
I always like road motels. Well, there is something attractive in them and at the same time dangerous and mysterious. They have a special atmosphere.
In my new work i wanted to show this mood just as i see it. And so happened that i moved away a little from realistic interiors and cars, toward the Art. I think it's not too bad sometimes. First idea about this project come from the Flickr photostream's about night photography. Also that is a great place to find any images you want.
* checked of the iMac display, in case of increased contrast, check your monitor settings
In my new work i wanted to show this mood just as i see it. And so happened that i moved away a little from realistic interiors and cars, toward the Art. I think it's not too bad sometimes. First idea about this project come from the Flickr photostream's about night photography. Also that is a great place to find any images you want.
* checked of the iMac display, in case of increased contrast, check your monitor settings
Project breakdown
The main reference was a google street view. Before making a layout of the scene, i just looked at the maps, check dimensions and getting started with modeling. I wanted to create only one main view. So, I did not reproduce the environment completely but only those parts that were necessary for the picture.
The final scene looks like this and contains about 11 million polygons.
Lighting
For me lighting is one of the most favorite stages of creating images.
Scene was lit by one main light source, which gives a nice shadow on the building to create a depth. I spent several days tweaking the light scheme, scenarios, etc. Take a look at the video. I recorded a time-lapse with the final setup, two times more faster than original. Just 10 minutes about a lighting in this project with a nice music.
Texturing
Materials are not very complex, most of them is rather simple with awesome textures, mostly 8-16k for the big parts like a road, sidewalk, etc., and 4-6k for the small details. It seems a bit overloaded, but with a powerful computer you have no problem here. However, for the most cases I have to optimize my workflow. I used assets from Textures.com and Megascans Library most for the texturing as well. Megascans is great. In my opinion it is perfect for closeup shots and not suitable for big scale surfaces.
A few most interesting assets
Hydrant
Wooden electric pole
Neon Sign
Green lightbox
Compositing
It was interesting, of course! First of all, I have not ever compose works like this. Normally, I always tried to make a fine beauty pass and add a few final touches like contrast, curves, etc.
Raw image from Corona VFB without any tone mapping applied. Not so bad i think.
We can leave it like this, but I would like to polish my skills in compositing. I have got a Nuke short-time trial license and was happy to try it in my workflow.
Thanks for watching
