Another piece of work produced at ripe for Media City in Manchester. After winning a recent pitch to work on the Media City account, ripe are now producing a number of pieces of design work for the scheme. This image was produced for use in a brochure and shows a number of schemes produced by the Peel group. I thought it would be nice to show how this image developed and i’ve uploaded a few additional image to show how it ended up looking as it does here in the final 3d render.

This is a screengrab of the user interface in 3d Studio Max. You can see here how max can give you good visual feedback for textures and colour through it’s Direct X shaded renderer.

Here’s a wireframe render of the scene, you can see there’s actually quite a lot of 3d geometry in the scene as each button is modeled, there’s no fancy bump or displacement maps, everything is geometry, which means it will look clean and crisp when rendered at high resolution.

Next is a straight forward RGB render straight out of Max and Vray with no re-touching at all. I didn’t use and global illumination on this scene as I needed to get the image produced quickly and to be fair the scene is quite simple and has lots of light based textures, so it didn’t really need it.

Lastly is the all important ambient occlusion pass. This is rendered with the Mental Ray rendering engine built into 3ds Max. I always use Vray as my primary rendering engine, as i’ve spent far too much of my life learning it and it is nice ! You can generate this ‘fake GI’ effect in Vray using a reasonably new feature called Vray Dirt, you can even build this shader into your other shader so you don’t need to render a separate pass. I do though like to have lots of control control in Photoshop with all my renders so that I can add lots of finishing touches and having this pass as a separate layer really allows you to control it’s effect on your final image.

That’s pretty much it, there’s quite a bit of tweaking in Photoshop with levels / curves and some additional specular bloom to create the final image. I also added some additional colored bloom around the colored buttons as the Vray render wasn’t as bright as I wanted. All in all quite a nice quick job, with a nice result for a bespoke spread for the brochure.