The Making of "Living Room in LWF"

by ERICK Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:05 pm

Hi guys, today I am going to guide you on how to make the Living Room in LWF rendering in 3dsMax Design 2011, Vray 1.5 SP5, and Photoshop CS5 from set-up to post processing. Without further a-do let's keep the ball rolling!

This would not be as detailed as other tutorials out there, but this somehow will guide you through the entire process. And you will achieve this: (Click to enlarge)

Okay let's start! First your gamma setting should look like this:

Let's go to top view so that you could see my lighting set-up

I just made a single vray light plane outside the room and copied (instanced) and scaled them to each windows. See below the settings of the vray light plane:

I always set my Intensity mode to "Temperature" and set it to 6000 to achieve a light bluish color. Intensity multiplier will depend now on how bright you want to achieve on your scene, for now I set it to 40 ( a very bright intensity)

We will now zoom out a little bit to see the location of my Sun and Dome lighting:

I used Directional light for my sun (for me it's easy to manipulate), give it an orange-peach color and Vray Dome with HDRI for my ambient lighting. Please see settings below:

I will also include the material settings of the wood flooring and the curtain (if someone would ask...)

For the curtain material, I used Vray 2-sided material. Create first the front material, drag (copy) to 2nd slot to create Back material of the same setup but, give it a subtle refraction. Now, give it some translucency of RGB:20,20,20

As for the camera settings see image below for set-up:

I dropped my F-number to 1.6 to drastically have a very bright ambiance.

And finally the Vray settings, see image below:

It's very typical as you would see, except for the Color Mapping in which a set-up for Linear workflow.

Wireframe:

Final (Post-Processed):

As for the post-processing, see images below my procedure on how to achieve this kind of bursting blue and green colors saturating in my images:

First open your raw (beauty) render and AO Pass, duplicate the AO Pass to your beauty pass then set it to Multiply and set Opacity according to your taste.

Without AO:

With AO:

Merge visible

Make adjustment layer "Levels" and follow these settings:

Make adjustment layer "Selective Color" then follow these settings:

Make another adjustment layer "Selective Color" then follow these settings:

Now here's my favorite part, the color balancing, here I freely adjust the colors and of course according to my taste, you should try to do your own settings too. But for now, if you want to achieve a bluish/greenish tint on your renders you should/must follow what I have created.

Set your Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights Levels with these numbers:
Shadow Levels: -12, -5, -11
Midtone Levels: -15, -10, -25
Highlight Levels: -10, -2, -7

When you're done, your image will look similar or closely on what I have got:

Then, make the last selective color adjustment layer:

Click the "Background" layer, duplicate it (Ctrl+J), and move it on top of all the layers then set it to Sof Light with opacity of 20%

Then click again the "Background" layer, duplicate it (Ctrl+J), and move it on top of all the layers then set it to Color Burn with opacity of 20%

Then merge visible

And finally, put some vignette and CA (this is optional)

That is all my friends. Hope you find this mini tutorial very useful to your projects. See you again guys!!!

Raw render:

Final processed render: