Making of Moscow urban area visualization

Shift-visuals 2013-06-19 10:36 tutorial > Making of > misc

Hello guys !I'm Florian from the french Architectural Rendering studio : www.shift-visuals.com. Today i'm gonna show you how the magic happens in our images. For this, I choosed a competition Image for a huge urban project in Moscow designed by Ateliers Lion Architects.

We had 3 days to complete this work including modeling. We were two people involved, Mathieu did the model and I did the Photoshop.

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Final render

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At first architects gave us a draft sketch up model, dwg files for the facades...

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...and some hand drawn sketches for the global idea of the project.

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From this Mathieu has built this heavy rhino model.

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While he was modeling, I was searching for the right angle and lighting in Cinema 4D with sketchup model imported.

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Model in Cinema 4D - different angle

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Once the Rhino model was finished, I imported it into Cinema 4d. As you can see we have only five ugly materials, it's our way to work, we dont spend a lot of time tweaking the textures and lighting in C4D, we prefer to do a very basic rendering, then do the serious stuff in Photoshop.

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To make the work easier, we used a lot the object buffer option of C4D that creates channels directly in the .psd file. Here is an example of the glass layer.

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Now it's time to render the scene, no time to sleep: the render time is around 30 minutes for a 5000x2000 pixels image.

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As you can see there is still a lot to do...
Our goal was to do a cold snowy Image with warm touches from the bricks and the interiors. At this time it's just a dead futuristic city. To fit the mood of the image I had to find the proper grey sky texture, I came up with that one, adding a sun behind the clouds to match with the 3d lighting.

The following screenshots doesn't show exactly the way I work on the PSD, i show only the big steps to understand our approach to rendering - in reality the file is a mess and has almost one hundred layers.

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For the foreground I searched on google image pictures of snowy roads.

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Applying snow in the front

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I added some dead trees and snow covered trees.

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Curves adjustements and the cell render added in multiply mode gave us a more contrasted image.

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more contrast...

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Now it's time to bring life to the image. Adding people from our 2d people library.

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Adding cars the same way.

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Using the bricks mask channel, I warmed up a bit the brick and give it more vibrance.

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For the interiors I used plenty of google images of shop mixed with screen mode.

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Compositing layers

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For the snow fall I once again used a google image in screen mode

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Snow put into visualization

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Some final adjustments

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And here is the final render!

Hope You enjoyed this workflow sneak peek! :)

www.shift-visuals.com

Author: Shift-visuals

Tags: shift-visuals

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