Pass of occlusion, used in Photoshop in an overlay fusion mode to enhance the shadows. Black

parts will help to get a bolder sensation of the volume.

 

Modelling and displaying the elements in the scene. The broken effects has been done with Bullet engine in Lightwave. Setting up the main lighting of the composition, paying closer attention to the glass and metal.

 

Second pass for the realistic glass effect in Maxwell render. For this I had first to install the Maxwell to Lightwave plugin available in the official website. To install it you have to seek the route Plugins 64bits of Newteck. Also, you can customize the Layout menu in: Edit > Menu Layout.

 

To build up an scene in Lightwave that could work in Maxwell, you have to apply Shaders to the geometry to make them work as lights. Lighting engine in Layout from Lightwave has no compatibility with Maxwell, so you have to construct your 1 sided rectangles or spheres if you want to set up your light sources.

 

The hardest part here has been setting up the right lightening. I had to apply shaders to the textures in Lightwave (MaxwellLayeredMaterial included in the plugin). To convert certain textures in light emitters we have to delete the BSDF attribute and apply Add Emitter.

 

This is the base of our artwork once all the render passes are merged with different kinds of fusion modes. While the glass is based in additive fusion styles and regulated through mask layers with gradients, the metallic parts are composed with subtractive fusion modes. Also, I merged a real photography of a city that matches the luminosity of the bulb with the multiply mode and the normal mode, creating a more detailed version of the buildings.

 

The landscape is based in a photography that can be added through screen fusion mode due to the dark tonalities of the render without affecting it. I have used 2 different sets of brushes, one of smoke and other of clouds. I have positioned the main smoke stream and deformed it with the transform tool to get the illusion of this sort of “atmosphere” escaping from its container. 

 

For the clouds, I began deciding the heterogeneous display in the main glass, but also I had to split them in the edge of the broken glass to respect the refraction properties of real glass. I have been using masks to recreate this lens effect and also added a real photography of sparkles and fire to the exploding resistance with screen fusion mode.

For the final touches, I have recreated more little pieces of broken glass and dust with photographic sources, some cloud brushes merged with blurring effects to recreate profundity and movement, and some reflects of the sparkles inside the glass with photographic references too. I always do at the end the technique called “Burn and Dodge”: over everything I created a 50% grey layer in the overlay mode, in that way only the parts affected with the Dodge and Burn tools from Photoshop will affect the desired areas we want to pop out. Also, for the last final touch I created a merged layer on the top (Ctrl+Alt+E) as well in the overlay fusion mode. Then I applied the effect High Pass, if you do so in this order you will be able to preview the sharp edges more easily.