I've been in the 3D world for a year and a half. And I have discovered that it is my passion. I guess for someone who starts and is as excited as I am, would make the same mistake.
What I mean is the approach I made when starting the final project process. I wanted to show everything I had learned in this year in my first 3D video.
I started working on it and decided that I would make all the textures, to model everything, create an illumination that would change according to the scene, fires, liquids, different camera movements, etc. and all in about 4 months in the free time that I have left after leaving work.
Surely you will be with the same face that my teacher put when I told him about my Masterpiece.
Reality
Thanks to Miguel, my teacher during the Master at CICE, he helped me get my feet on the ground and adjusted the work I wanted to do after 4 months before I started rendering.
After doing several render tests and seeing what I could and could not introduce in the video with the time and resources I had, I decided to dedicate the most possible time in textures and modelling.
To do this, I decided to focus the project on a summer kitchen-dining room that was empty for long periods of time and that within the immobility of the objects and the coldness of an empty space, the light will take centre stage.
Due to a limited time few scenes have been not added to the final video.
Modelling
The truth is that the whole process from the beginning, research, first sketches, until the end with post-production, I enjoy every moment, but if I have to choose a skill, in particular, it is modeling.
The way we manage to model using vertices and edges, from simple boxes to faces of people, is amazing.
For modeling, I use 3D Studio Max. During this year at the CICE school, I have learned to use many of the tools that this software offers and starting from simple planes or splines, always using the edit poly, I have been modeling each of the objects that can be seen in the video, and many others that for lack of time have not been able to see the light.
One of my goals in this project was to improve all my skills by forcing myself to do the greatest number of tasks myself without going to gallery objects, and it is one of the points that I am most proud of.
For the modeling of fabrics, I used Marvelous Designer, with which I can easily make curtains, kitchen traps and the sofa.
The trees were made with GrowFX.
Textures
For the textures, I used Substance Designer as base and textures of Poliigon.com and for the dirt and imperfections in Poliigon.com they have a section of "Surface Imperfections" that combined with the Vray mapslike VrayDistanceTex or VrayDirt make the work of aging textures very easy.
To show my knowledge with particles I decided to introduce foam in the sink. These particles were generated with PFlow and through PhoneixFD perform the Shader. The distribution of the particles over the water is made by maps.
It is a pity that it's not very visible in the final video, due to the composition.
Post-production
Post-production was done with Nuke X.
One of the strengths that I wanted to show in the video was that mixture between light and dust that characterises a house emptied for long periods. I did several render tests with particles and volumetric light in Vray, but the rendering times were very long, so I had to leave that effect for post-production.
For the dust I generated a 3d scene in NukeX, where I placed in front of the render a camera with an emitter of particles between them and moved the particles with a particle-turbulence.
The extra lighting to give that feeling of volumetric is done with GodRays.
I'm not 100% happy with the result, but during the process, I learned a lot about NukeX, so it was worth it.
Also, I left DOF for post-production, and generate a zDepth map using Vray. Nuke allows you to perform this effect using the zDFocus node in a very simple and visual way.The rest of the post-production is color-correct retouching and a vignette.
Music
I have had the privilege of having a composer for my video. I want to thank Mario Rodriguez immensely, not only for his constructive criticism that always makes me be better at what I do, also for his great work composing and playing the short song, without it, it would not be the same result!