Modled in Hex, rendered in Carrara

[markbremmer]

This was a fun project for a food and wine festival scheduled for Charleston, NC, USA in the spring of 2006. They have a row of historic homes on the waterfront called Rainbow Row - a tribute to their varied and brightly colored exteriors.

After reviewing an art directors sketch, my job was to build a quirky, fun and comical caricature of the historic row of houses using food as architectural details. The palm tree, a signature plant in Charleston, was to be a garnish in the wine.

Hexagon was my first choice for modeling this scene because it's so fast and easy to use - total modeling time was less than 60 minutes. The wine glass was distorted with the bend tool after it was created. Shading domains were assigned in Hexagon.

Final texturing, assembly and rendering was done in Carrara. The whimsical distortion of the street was created with Carrara's Wave deformer. Final type and tree melting into the wine was done with Photoshop. File printed reproduction size will be 16'x21".

[Grendel]

Looks great, I always like seeing commercial work.

[JuST]

Haha, funny! Cool work!

[Thomas]

Very nice stuff Mark !
Somme screencaptures?

[micaelito]

I love it !
Great !!

[ThePixelMines]

That is wonderful! What a creative way to meld the idea of the festival with the homes. The modeling only took an HOUR?! Man, Hexagon must be easy to use. I've never touched the thing. I've been doing all of my modeling IN Carrara.

Either way, your work is impressive.

[moxstudios]

Sweet, Nice job, Superb

[AWBenson]

ThePixelMines: Hexagon is a dedicated modeler. Carrara, while capable, isn't well designed for complex work. Until C5, there wasn't even a bevel tool. You'll find that separate programs like Hexagon will greatly speed up your work-flow. Also, having a specialized UV Unwrapping program will also help speed things up.

You might also look into some plug-ins like Anything Goos from DCG for Carrara. This could also speed up the workflow if you are using alot of procedural textures and don't want to UV Unwrap and paint by hand.

AWBenson

[AWBenson]

Mark: Always good to see your stuff in action. How long did it take you to texture this and did you use any pre-made textures?

AWBenson

[Cees BoZ]

Nice and sunny. It should attract a lot of hungry people. The print of the wineglass (red wine) is excellent too.

cees boz

[markbremmer]

Hi everyone, thanks for the kind words!

Texturing took about 5.5 hours - all original (it's the only way to get truly unique looks!) Carrara's UV editor helped out tremendously to get everything where it belonged.

Lighting took about 2 more hours. While there is only a single light in the scene, because I was using Global Illumination + Indirecte lighting Realistic Sky + an HDRI background, it simply took awhile to balance out the elements.

I'd originally wanted to render this in the C5Beta (much faster) but just before I was ready to start, a new build came out and the DCGbeta shaders I was using stopped behaving well - the risk of using a beta. ;) So, final art was rendered in C4Pro with 2 dual G5's and and G5 imac. Because it is for a large, printed poster, and resolution was high with GI lighting through transparency and took 5.5 hours to render. The final file size was 95M. For comparison, the lighting tests at screen resolution, 800x600 took only 3-4 minutes.

You'll notice if you look closely that the ambient shadows created by the indirect lighting are a little chunky. That is intentional for two reasons: 1) I liked the kind of natural grunge/imperfection it gave and 2) No more room in the deadline for a longer rendering!

[Odessey]

Being in the food service industry for 28 years as a certified chef i can really relate to this theme its a demanding way of life!
Beautifull render does justice to the food service.

[steama]

Mark, I was wondering if you would be kind enough to share some tips on how you modeled the wine in the glass to look so fluid and natural? Awesome job!

Thanks,

Steama

[markbremmer]

Hi Steama,

Since I'm lazy, I tried to find the easiest way to get it done in the least amount of time. ;)

The glass is a simply polyline circle that I did a free form extrusions from. The circle is very small and is at the center of the wine glass base. After the extrusion, both ends (the circle at the base and the one in the interior of the glass) were open so I closed them.

The next step was to draw the line that I would use to deform the glass with. I drew the simple "s" shape with the interpolated curve so the curve would be well defined, yet retain just a few control points to edit the whole thing.

Selecting the glass, I then chose the Bend tool and clicked on the "s" curve so the glass would distort in the likeness of the curve. It wasn't quite right so I selected the control points on the curve and moved them around, altering the glass simultaneously, until I was satisfied with the position. After that, I applied a couple of smoothing operations. (the beauty is, they're complete reversable and non desctructive - like the deformation is too)

For the wine, I reselected the glass at the highest geometry level, chose the polygon selection tool and highlighted most of the polygons inside the wine glass. I then copied and pasted which resulted in an exact duplicate of the distorted, interior geometry of the glass. Next, I created a standard sphere, twisted and distorted it and then subtracted it as a boolean from the wine geometry. As a last step I smoothed the results.

So, I have a wine glass and contents that are completely editable, despite all of the distortions and booleans.

The final object was exported as a .car file and imported into Carrara for texturing.

Hope this helps! :D

Mark