Photorealistic 3D scene is beautifully chaotic

An inspirational piece of 3D art, this scene took arch-viz environment artist Cornelius Dämmrich seven months to create. It's so detailed, it's one of those images you just need to sit and study. "Seeing it grow and the feeling after solving a problem is really great," says Dämmrich when asked what he enjoyed about creating Haze.

Dämmrich worked on a flipped canvas, which meant the Image was horizontally mirrored during the whole creation process. "That was important because I tend to loose the visual substance of an image when I see it every day, for several months. Flipping it after every preview is like seeing the artwork of a stranger, which really helps a lot."

Problems only arose when things needed changing, such as the scene's floor: "I had something very boring in mind and changed it to something more complex later in the process - the tiles are all real geometry and each one has its own UV map," says the artist.

"I tried to apply unique textures to them by using the mograph multishader with a standard VRay material, but it just didn't work the way I wanted, so I decided to map them all by hand. However, the fact that the multishader wouldn't work the way I wanted bothered me so much, that I spent almost two weeks trying to find a solution for multishading 20 tiles."

Dämmrich's struggle to solve problems has resulted in some new workflow tips, for instance: "If you setup C4D shaders with VRay materials, try to set them up with an advanced renderer material from C4D, not the VRay material - the open GL preview does not work that well with VRay materials and if you use a multishader with a cloner, it helps seeing the preview of the effect in the viewport, and not only in the preview rendering."

Want to know more? Check out this cool making of video:

This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 179.