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Architectural visualiser, Simon, spent roughly two months researching and creating this incredible image. The majority of the image was modelled using 3ds Max with V-ray, plus additional Objectid and Depth passes. As Simon explains, “Objectid was very important in order to isolate different areas for varied treatments in Photoshop (especially with the glass) and then Zdepth was used for additional scene depth with those treatments. The scene is rendered using a V-ray physical camera with a small amount of distortion applied. I didn’t like the distortion on the high balloons so they were rendered separately and without distortion and then composited back into the scene later in Photoshop.”
With a scene of such magnitude, you’d expect some areas to cause issues and for Simon, it was the 160 people that tested his endurance. To cope with the task, he started each character as a simple ‘T’ pose avatar rigged with a default biped skeleton from 3ds Max. These were exported out as obj files into Marvelous Designer as an ‘avatar’ to be clothed and morphed into shape using the 3ds Max posed obj – see how he did it on page 60. After exporting, the materials were reassigned to V-ray inside 3ds Max. Simon designed five costume types for the characters, with varied textures and colours depending on the scenes they were in.
As to be expected, such a large scene started to drain his computer capacity and Simon found navigation and graphics began to suffer in 3ds Max. But he had a fix; “I split the whole into three separate models and then xrefed two of these back into the main model again. The building has a good deal of repetition so many elements are of course instanced to keep memory issues at a minimum.”