Making A Photorealistic Image

Hi Guys,

As you may know I read a lot of 3D World and 3D Artist Magazines, at the start of each magazine they have a gallery section on readers 3D Work. All of it I find very inspirational, the amount of Ideas you can get for your own work by looking at someone else's is phenomenal, not only that the amount of time people put into to creating one single still frame of 3D Work is also quite amazing.

I had a go at making a 3D Still back in January, it was of a Frozen in Time Car Crash. Back then I thought it was the bees knee's but looking back I see many faults! I used Maya for everything 3D and the Composited all the elements in Photoshop as well as adding in Fog ect.

Anyway recently I saw a nice piece of 3D Art Work of a Tomato with water droplets on and I thought I would try and recreate it. I Used 3DS Max (Of Course!!) and for rendering I used V Ray which I have just started learning and am still getting to grips with but I think its an amazing Renderer, very powerful and speedy. (Better than Mental Ray!). The Project took under 2 hours, the modelling of the tomato is relatively easy first you start of with a sphere and then I deformed it a little with a FFD Modifier. I then modelled the Water Droplets I just used 1 sphere and then used a particle system (Pflow) to scatter them on the surface of the tomato, I also set the size variation a little mixed so you could not tell it was the same object instanced. The Leaves and Stem very just Splines with a leaf texture off Google Images. 

Next Came Lighting and Rendering, As said I used Vray and I used Sub Surface Scattering (SSS2) for the Tomato which makes it look so much more realistic than just using a standard red material. The Water droplets were just Vray Mtl's. I Lit the shot using 2 Vray Lights and a HDRI Image. 

My First Intial Render looked a bit disappointing

, The Water Droplets looked fake and the HDRI was not integrated into the lighting well.

So I went back in and adjusted my lighting and shaders to get this render about 15 mins later.

As you can see the water looks so much better.

I then composited it with a still image of a garden blurred out due to the virtual cameras Depth of Field. A little bit of Colour Correction with the Hues and Saturation and Wella!! There you go, the finished Image.

Thanks for looking at my blog,

I'm working on a few other VFX Shots coming up later this week so that will be an ideal opportunity to post some info on them!

All the Best,

Niall