Creating 'Cloned to be different' By Tamas Medve

 

Discover the modeling, lighting, texturing and rendering processes behind Tamas Medve's 3ds Max Arch-Viz creation: Cloned to be different…

This project was created in collaboration with one of my best friends who wanted a taste of the world of arch-viz during his visit. Instead of giving him a boring introduction about the program tools I managed to involve him actively in certain parts of the creation process such as brainstorming, creating graphical elements and being the clip-art model. 

As a first phase we spent a week researching references and detailing the idea. I always put a great emphasis on this part. Visual, concept and mood references were equally important in order to begin working on our scene. The idea was to catch a special morning mood in a near future metropolis where many similar (cloned) people live their life. We wanted to picture this very unnatural state in a way that still feels real and kind of natural. Illustrating this contradiction needed quite a bit of input.

Lighting and camera set up
The modeling part cannot be started without a good setting. This is the core, the foundation of the whole image and includes the light and shadow balances, the proportions, weights and the camera angle.

It is essential to draw the surrounding building boxes too. They won't be seen in our scene directly but they determine the intensity and shape of the lights, shadows and reflections for us. To achieve the desired composition and balance I had to play around with those boxes, changing their positions and dimensions consistently.

Drawing the surrounding box building

 

This shows the lighting and camera setup

Modeling

I assume most of you guys already know how to model so I won't waste much time on explaining that. As you can see only the basic modeling tools were used to create all skyscrapers and everything else. This can be done without any special tools, however to enrich this tutorial with some technical notes I show you what method I used for
the skyscrapers:

Showing the structure of a floor unit

 

Multiplied units make a skyscraper

 

This is the finished skyscraper models

 

This perspective view from a different angle shows how simply the whole scene builds up

 

This is the perspective camera view

Materials

Here are some basic materials that I used in the scene.

Polycarbonate for the main building

 

Material for the chrome elements

 

Copper for the right hand side building

 

Marble for the stairs wall

 

Concrete for the stairs

Rendering

I then rendered the scene using the following settings, to create the following raw render.

The render settings

 

Raw render

Post-production

The other half of the job was done in Photoshop. This means freely manipulating every bit of the image to achieve the result I imagined initially. For this process I normally use tons of adjustments such as curves, levels, color-balance and hue-saturation. Glow, smoke, fog, mist also helps to create atmosphere. 

Placing the clip art into correct context gave me a hard time but playing around with these agent-looking clones was definitely a fun part of the creation.
I hope you find this short "making of" useful and inspiring.

The wire frame of the model

 

The final scene