3ds max tutorial – The Valley of my Mind

It’s a huge pleasure to present the next 3ds max tutorial made by Hamed Hosseinpour.

The basis for this recent work of mine was laid in a previous project from 2015 titled “castle of my mind” (story of the person look at his mind) after that and some consideration from websites & magazines I went back to that story once more. 

Inspirations

Placing the main character first

In this scene I’ve put the character in the viewport as basis for my composition and placed the camera (Prior to this, I did some sketches).

In this scene, I put the character in the viewport and place the camera. Before I start in 3dsmax I make some sketches.

 Let’s Rock! Using “Rock Generator”

I used the Rock Generator script by Alessandro Ardolino for 3dsmax to create every stones and rocks in the scene (just did some FFD on them for random look), and used V-Ray proxy for many rocks in the scene.

The Green Stuff

My goal in this work was to show the GREEN and some natural elements. In this section I used some high quality 3d models from Evermotion Archmodel 117 collection, R&D iBushes and iToo Forest Pack Grass.

All shaders were either tweaked or redone for more quality.

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Scattered around – 3ds max + Forest Pack

For scattering all the trees and plants I used Forest Pack and Advanced Painter.

Scene focus

The main parts of the scene as I indicated them and planned for.

Composition

Not the most common framing was picked for this view, but I like it and exploring composition is key. This image below shows what I had in mind for this frame…

Coloring

Before I started to create materials, I took an overall approach to this view… what would be my scheme? You can find many design seeds online, just google it. In this part, a book that really helped me was “learning to see creatively: design, color & composition in photography” by Bryan Peterson.

This is the seed for my image :

HDRI Lighting

An important part of my work is the lighting setup. I used just one HDRI from Peter Guthrie’s PGSkies. The 0743 one. For more effective and more sharp light I do the lower “inverse gamma” to HDRI map and the result is great.

The Waterfall

To create the waterfall I just used some planes mapped with textures for a fast and effective result (you can use RealFlow or other simulating plugins to create real water).

The Rust – 3ds max material

Here’s the rusted metal material node structure

Water – 3ds max

I made the water texture from a high-res image, used with these settings.

 The Rock Material – 3ds max

Simple rock material with V-Ray displacement

 Leaves

All plants and trees material is VRay2SidedMtl and all of them have color corrections (and other shaders created with simple V-Ray material and some little edit).

Settings 3ds max | V-ray

The Elements

Postproduction

My post-work is done in 4 master parts :

1. Render Elements
2. 2D Elements
3. Fog and Light Rays
4. Color and Contrast

In part 4 I add these elements as well to control various aspects of the visual :

• V-Ray Lighting
• V-Ray Reflection
• V-Ray Diffuse Filter
• V-Ray Specular

Fog & Light Rays

Final result

Check our previous tutorial from 3ds max

3DS MAX TUTORIAL – MAKING OF NORTHERN WISPS

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• Modern house – B&W- Making Of by Michał Jaroszewicz
• 3ds max tutorial – The Valley of my Mind
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