Venice

This is my final foundation project at Think Tank Training Centre (Online). The render is based on a concept made by Ahmed Eljohani https://www.artstation.com/eljo. I learned a lot from creating this piece! The process was fun and stressful at times, but it was all worth it.

 When I started my journey at Think Tank, I knew nothing about 3D, and I had 0 ideas that I will be able to learn so much in 4 months. This is my first complete project, and I have learned a lot working on it. I modeled it in Maya, textured it in  Mari, rendered it using V-Ray and Composed it in Photoshop.

The aim of our project is to translate a 2D concept art piece to 3D. Venice is one of Ahmed Eljohani's pieces that has resonated in my mind since the day I saw it, so I decided I will go for it as my final Foundation project at Think Tank.

When I started modeling this piece, I had a goal in mind. I wanted to make the water more reflective and change the colors by making them more vibrant and saturated. 

I started with getting the perspective right and carried on with blocking my scene. After that, I made a rough water material to see how my block is looking and whether I need to edit or fix anything. 

Next, I polished my scene and broke it down to top, mid, characters, and bottom to prepare it for UVing and texturing. Subsequently, I opened each scene on its own in Mari and started texturing and hand painting details and testing my channels in Maya V-ray.

After I finished texturing, I researched the river's depth in Venice and experimented with BOSS and V-Ray water material to get the best-looking water material, and added a textured plane at the bottom.

Then, I created a mask for the foam in photoshop to project on the BOSS plane I had and then baked a diffuse map to use later in a blend material. I used the same baked map as a displacement, and then I edited the attributes to get the results I wanted.

The process of creating this piece, specially the water taught me a lot and was fun and exciting to model and texture. Special thanks to my supervisor, classmates and friends at Think Tank who supported me and helped during my final project  journey.