Making of The Coliseum

By 3DM3

I tried to reproduce the glamour of it, showing how big and beautiful the Coliseum is. That’s why the scene was made with a night render.

References

Hi guys! I was looking for a beautiful construction, then I found the Coliseum. I got some references but it was hard to extract the details from them. The references available on the web are not good enough, most of them are low resolution. But with patience everything is possible!

Modeling

Almost the whole scene was modeled with splines and extrudes. For some objects I used poly modeling. I used splines because they are simpler to get the shape of the object, like the walls of the coliseum. If I had used poly modeling to make the shapes I would have wasted too much time. Here are some examples:

Textures

For the textures i combined procedural with painted maps. I used this technique in almost the whole scene. To make the grass I combined displacement with vray fur, and doing it i got a nice tangled look for the grass. In the images shown below there is only a displacement map, in the final render they are combined. For the trees i used a simple map with an alpha channel for the leaves and for the trunk I used a wood map duplicated many times.

Lightning

The light was a very complicated process. I tried many times to get a good result but the render was too slow. I did many light passes to get the result i was looking for. I used many different colors. For the envirovment i used a combination of brown with red. It gives a realistic look to the envirovment(normaly we find it in city skies). For the windows i used many area lights, To the right side of coliseum i used a spot light and to create shadows in the grass, two white area lights.

Rendering

For the render I used vray 1.5. I turned on irradiance map like primary bounces, and light cache for secondary bounces. For the color mapping i used HSV Exponential. The parameters are listed in the pictures below.

And camera settings are shown on the picture below:

Post Production

I rendered in two layers, the first was the environment with the grass, the trees and the floor. The second was the coliseum. I used Photoshop to make the composition, the background and the color correction.

And the final image see below:

About me

My name is Elvio cavalcante, Im 21 years old. I majored in Multimedia Design and work with 3d for aproximately four years. I´m currently working at Margarida Filmes, a post production house in Brazil.