Inspiration and preparation I found inspiration in movie Helen Of Troy. I tried to imitate some things but i also remake some things untill it looked as good as i wanted. I quickly sketched scene and some fundamental things what I wanted have in. But final scene is very different comparing it to the sketches.
Modeling I always start modeling from main object of the scene. Thats why I have started model Troyan horse first. I made plain model of real horse at first, just for proportion and then I started work on horse itself. Modeling wasn't so difficult but slow due to details of horse. Whole horse is made from single wooden boards. I let most of wooden boards fell on model of horse, reactor (with big friction so they didn't fall away) helped me with it little bit, but I still had to edit it by hand. Then, when it was mostly completed i just made some small details (bucklers, mounting and some trimming).
I modeled environmental scene mostly from basic primitives using editable poly. Then was time for small details e.g. scattered boards parts, wooden wheels and other mess what I scattered with assistance reactor again.
Next point on the list were characters. With help of editable poly I modeled one lowpoly character, which I transformed into other looks. Then I modeled contemporary clothes inspired by movie for each character, and I rigged them on Biped from Character Studio.
Texturing Most of models was textured in very simple way and it didn't need mapping because i was using procedurals materials.
The biggest problem was texturing of Troyan horse, because it consists of about 1200 wooden parts. So I made a few textures with big resolution, which contains couple textures of wooden boards. After that I just mapped with unwrap modifier all boards with different count of polygons, then I only moved mapping coordinates so i used every part of texture. I saved my mapping and mapped randomly another boards. Using this method I got nice seemless texturing of whole horse.
Lighting and composition I always set lights during the compositing because it really bear on it. First I directed cameras till i have position which I wanted.At the same time I selected widescreen camera (Lens:15mm). After all I added finalrender light RectangleLight and I was moving view of camera to get shine of metal parts on places i wanted.
Materials After preexposure scene I started making materials. Most of materials are fr-advanced. Lot of time was spend on metal and sand material. Metal was made with few Blend materials, where i put together rust, clean reflexive metal and also dirty metal. I'm not very happy with material of sand because it seems like one color in final render. But when I set material to see more roughness it didn't suite to overall lighting. I decided for the first variant.
Rendering and postproduction For rendering I used finalRender. Adaptive antialiasing 4/64, Global-Illumination Quasi Monte-Carlo samples: 20, secondary samples 15. Whole picture was rendered into 2 layers where in the first layer was almost everything and in the secondary layer were few another characters and objects. Rendertime was about 40 hours due to really killing settings of antialiasing and some big textures. I composed it together in Photoshop and in the end i adjust colours and few tiny details.
I hope this article brought you something...
Best Regards,
Jiri Wolf
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