Making of Moriyama House In The Snowfall by Vid Benišek

Hello everyone! I have not written anything long time. I hope you’ll soon find more time for engagement on the blog ….. anyway …. when you find a good topic then you must find the free time to write. Today I want to introduce you to the excellent work “Moriyama House In The Snowfall” by Vid Benišek. Yes it is a superb CG artist and see his other works on his behance profile.

I have long surveyed his work and I’ll be free to tell him first “artist” and then CG. Simply, he was impressed me  with the amount of energy that is incorporated into his works. In these cold winter days, especially for me nostalgic act work that shows a summer idyll coast of the Adriatic Sea …. by the way I’m counting the days until the holidays :). Vid, thanks for this great works.

CONCEPT:

Hello there!I present you a short tour through my latest project Moriyama house in the snowfall. The scene wasn’t that hard to make and I’ll show you how to make this snowy scene in a pretty quick way.This is my first making-of and I hope you’ll find it useful.Winter is my favorite period within the whole year and the main idea was to produce a warm idyllic winter scene.

MODELING:

Models were editable polies made from simple boxes by standard editable poly tecniques . I usually get the reference images from flickr. In this case I found a house on google street view so i was also able to see some details more closely.

The snow on some objects it’s based on extruded polygons from the base object and then relaxed with turbosmoth plus some noise modifiers. For rooftops and flat surfaces covered with snow I used the SnowFlow plugin. Another great script which helped me to achieve the roof tiles really fast was Atiles by AvizStudio Tools. Along the road, the snow pile it’s a simple model made with Vray Displacement modifier which is actually visible in render.

MATERIALS AND TEXTURES:

Moriyama house texturing it’s based on a dirt map(inverted normals) and some leak masks. Here is the brief and example of this technique which you might probably know already: www.spot3d.co…es_vraydirt.htm

Same settings go for the rest of the houses.

This is a modified displacement map that I used for the most parts of the scene. Textures were downloaded from CG textures and Texturelib.com

At some stages of the texturing process, I „baked“ the occlusion map with some objects using render to texture option, just to make sure textures are in the right place. Here is example of occlusion pass in photoshop using multiply mode.

And here is finalized detailed texture:

For the fence flakes, I just blended the metal balconies and snow material with the mask I made in Photoshop.

Falling snow it’s a blizzard particle system connected with a wind force directed to the VrayPhysical camera. The important trick here is to turn on the camera motion blur and in V-ray settings to achieve that windy blizzard effect. Vray environment fog settings are below:

LIGHTING AND RENDERING:

For lighting I used Cloudy HDRI map with render multiplier 30,0 . These are the render settings:

POSTPRODUCTION:

The post production was made in AfterEffects mainly.
The render passes I used in composition are all above beutty pass and they go in this order:
– Vray ExtraTex map with VrayDirt texture as occlusion pass
– VrayGlobal Ilumination
– Vray Reflection
– Vray refraction
– Vray Specular
– Vray Atmosfere
– Vray zdepth.

Postproduction and color correction are usually done in Magic Bullet Look plugin for AfterEffects. As you can see, there are a few settings which were enough to finalize the image. CC Snowfall effect goes on top of the layers.

This is it! I hope you found something useful in this tour.
Feel free to contact me at v.benisek@gmail.com if you want to know more!