“Making of The Dragons ” by Erasmus Brosdau
Then set up a pose for the mother dragon and the baby dragon:
For the environment I wanted to have something mechanical, but not too exagerated, the main focus should be the 2 dragons. So I just placed the scene in an open box and modified it with the greeble modifier: This box gets a slighty different material than the dragon’s main skin. I just chaged the color a bit and the reflectivity.
Step 4: The lighting
In Maxwell you cant use the embedded MAX lights, you have to create your own light emitting objects. The best is to set up a simple plane and assign a light emitting material to it. I used 3 light emitting planes, all placed circular around the scene. The strongest light comes from the front. One of the best features of Maxwell is the multilight function. This allows you to change the strength of the lights after the rendering. Because of that we dont have to care too much of the lights now, because we can change them later on as we want to. Important is only the placement of the lights. Set up a few lights more if you are not sure what you like most, you even can still turn them off after rendering.
Step 5: Rendering
At this point of time, the whole scene is finished, all materials are assignend and the lights are on the right spot. Now we can render the whole scene. You must be very sure that everything is set up properly, because Maxwell needs much time to render. So it’s better not to see in the final image a mistake what you still like to change, that would cost you a few days render time again. ( except you have a render farm)
For this image I rendered it with an Intel dualcore 2,4 ghz and 2 gigabytes of RAM.
Important in the render dialouge is to switch on multilight and to set the sampling level and the render time. This is important because you have to tell him how long he should render on the image. Maxwell works like a camera, just in slow motion. The image is already there when you hit render, but almost black and totally grainy. But with more time, more and more photons are coming into the lense and the image gets clearer and brighter. These steps of process are the sampling levels. The higher the sampling level, the better/cleaner looks the final render image. But with every new level the needed time for the next level raises.
I let my PC render about 2-3 days (something about 50-60 hours) and ended with sample level 17. Thats still a bit too grainy if you want to have a clean image, so I tweaked the result with a software called Neat Image, which can reduce the amount of noise in an image. Afterwards, I opened it in Photoshop and made some color corrections. Then I added a new layer just with 10% opacity, which had a slight gradient from dark green over blue to orange on it. At the end I painted a kind of bright light which seems to come from the top right of the image it.
The image which came out of Maxwell
The finished Image THE DRAGONS
I hope I could help you to understand the turbosmooth modifier a bit and some basic knowledge of the maxwell render engine. If you are interested in more works from me, please visit…
(c) Erasmus Brosdau , www.destrega.de , http://cggallery.itsartmag.com/gallery/Destrega/
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