Bibendum chair tutorial, part 3

Hello!

This is Matus, welcome to the last part of the tutorial for the legendary Bibendum chair. Feel comfortable to follow these steps, and in case of any problem, post the question in the comment area below. If you missed previous tutorial (making of upholstery) click here to visit the page. So this is where we had finished a few days ago:

Now we are going to render our model. Maybe you already tried to render your models instead of waiting for this third part of the tutorial (that’s exactly what I would do, to be honest :) ).

Scene and texture mapping

Okay, let’s get down to the serious business now. We are going to work on texture mapping in the next few steps. If you followed our tutorial properly, you won’t experience any problem in this part. Click on the surface, apply the material defined previously. In this case it is leather. For diffuse map we are going to use simple color, not a leather texture, so we have to simulate leather for real. We do not have the options to see bump map on the surface, so what we need to do is upload bump map as a diffuse map for leather material. Now you can see leather material on the surface mapped in not very nice way, it is stretched too much in both directions.

For cylindrical parts use DEFAULT MAPPING and set the repeat factor to 5 ( don’t forget it depends on your texture size!) For the front, rounded faces use planar mapping (because they are made out of two simple surfaces and it’s not possible to use Default mapping on polysurfaces. Check the box for Advanced mapping options and press the “Show mapping” button. This magic button will make the mapping widget visible and you can use basic Rhino tools (Move, Rotate) to adjust it to its correct position. See image above.)

Now you can continue doing the same for every single part of the model. Don’t forget to adjust Repeat factor precisely, because in other case your texture will have different scale on every surface, what might not be very nice.

and voi-lá: here it is. Model is mapped.

Now get back to your Material Editor, switch Diffuse material from Bitmap to Color and pick a color you like. I used dark red color, because this color will add more contrast to our scene.

Lightning

For lightning I used three planar lights. One of them is in front of  the chair, using bright white color with multiplier of 20. Light on the right side is light orange and multiplier for this light is 60. Last light panel shines with multiplier of 30 and is positioned on the left side of the chair. Do not forget to TURN OFF “No decay” option for all of them! Position your camera, adjust Lens length.

Rendering

Now we need to tweak our Scene settings. Go to Options and have a look at my settings. The fastest option will be using the Irradiance map engine, because we do not have any difficult surfaces in the scene, such as carpet or anything with a lot of displacement on it. Click the image to see full resolution picture:

That’s almost everything. Now save your scene and press Render button for the last time.

Wait until render is done and save All the channels if you did not set your V-ray to do it automatically for you.

Postproduction

As you can see, our image has a quite yellowish tone. We need to get rid of it in Photoshop (Yes, we could use White balance in V-ray, but this will be faster, because we do not have to set color tones and render the scene ten times to see the result) So import these channels to Photoshop:

RGB channel,

RAW reflection channel

RAW Global Illumination channel.

Copy and Paste them into one document, so you will get three layers. Name them.

Convert your document to 16bits (your imported HDRis have 32bits each) >> click Image in top menu and select Mode option, now click on 16bit row. Do not merge layers after this!

For RAW reflection channel set Soft Light mode and 70% opacity.

For RAW GI channel use Soft Light mode as well, but with 30% opacity.

Now use some Color corrections, Level adjustments and Curves to tweak up your final render. Your settings depends on your Screen, so there are not any “super ideal” values usable for everyone to do this.

I personally don’t satisfy only with Photoshop adjustments, I usually go to Adobe Lightroom after Photoshop and add some Vignetting and Chromatic aberration to achieve more realistic result:

So this is it! :) We are done with the Bibendum chair tutorial. You can see the final image here:

I hope you like this and you enjoyed our tutorial.

What do you think? Did you like this tutorial? If yes, share it on Facebook, Twitter, StumpleUpon, Buzz, Digg or anywhere else :) And don’t forget to leave a comment under the article. Thanks for reading it to this point! Have a nice day.

PS: Do you extremely like my effort? Now you can support me via PayPal to keep me alive! You can donate ANY amount :) God bless you! Using these money I will buy more coffee to stay up longer and work on more tutorials and models! :)

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