CGSociety

Hi All,


The image is part of a project I have finished recently.


My main brief was to create an image that could sell the space to potential clients.



These types of marketing images are quite popular within the professional visualisation industry.



As such, I took the standard path of going through three main steps:






1-Pre-production: this vital preliminary step consisted on taking the brief from the client. In this brief, they came up with their drawings and their sketchy ideas.



I then took all the information on board; did some heavy R&D based on their original brief and presented them with a mood board depicting my vision of the art direction.



This mood board led to another brainstorming session between me and the client, which culminated into a final mood board that we both liked (i.e. final collage).



It was vital for me to signoff this crucial stage of the project to prevent changing the course of the art direction at later stage, and to ensure that we both had a clear idea of the final result.



When failing to signoff this important process (i.e. pre-production), the final product will be more likely to be exposed to criticism and constant reviews by the client.

Furthermore, it may subsequently result in stretched budgets and unfulfilled expectations by both the client and the Artist or Studio.



2-Production: Having gone through the pre-production process and considered some of the artistic and technical approaches available, I began applying the shaders and textures. All shaders and textures were based on real photo references supplied by the client and sourced by me during the R&D process.

I have carefully ensured that the scene had interesting reflections (i.e. plain and diffused); highlights from the sunlight and from artificial lights; direct and diffused shadows; glossy highlights from materials (plain and diffused) and the correct bump values on materials.



The following process was to begin lighting the scene carefully. By that, I first introduced the daylight system to set the sunlight and its shadows in the scene. I obviously took references from photos of the agreed mood board.



Next, I began adding the artificial ceiling lights. There was a quick test render of each artificial light created (i.e. with a plain non reflective white OVERRIDE material). This was to prevent the scene from quickly becoming bleached out with too many lights. Each artificial light had a soft shadow.



I had also ensured that there was a clear definition between lit and dark areas in the scene, in order to create depth.



Once I was fairly satisfied with the overall lighting I had disabled the material override for final big size region test renders.



The final image Size was 4000x3000 pixels.



I had produced the renders for mental ray & V-Ray.



3-Post production: This process is arguably the most important stage towards signing off a project. All previous steps and the technical decisions will culminate into this final process.



Effects such as vignetting, depth of field, glow/glare, grain, colour correction, etc, are often applied and tweaked in post. Mostly due to these effects being under more scrutiny by clients.



One could easily had implemented these effects directly from 3Ds Max. However, Applying these affects in post increases the work efficiency when matching the photo reference closely with the cliente. It will also provide more flexibility to add or omit such effects if or when necessary.



The above mentioned workflow allowed me to produce the final renders within the allocated and budget, while using different platforms and rendering engines to achieve the same results.



I hope you have found the final result interesting.



Any comments are welcome.


Regards



Jamie

http://jamiecardoso-mentalray.blogspot.com/