Creating "DBT Cafe" By: Juan Siquier

Modelling
The modeling of the scene is very simple where I start from a plain drawing, then with splines, I apply all necessary extrusions. I don't like to use the boolean operation in MAX, so I made the window holes by cutting the geometry with slice planes and then apply extrusions with negative values. When I have modelled the windows and doors, I proceed to add small damages to the borders using bevels and edges that I subdivide for later or add some noise.
I then slice the polygons of the whole house and slightly curve all the surfaces avoiding direct lines, if possible.
The awning was made with Examesh and Clothreyes and pipes were created by lofting a circle. Pivots are all lathed lines and the cables, antennas and the handrails of the balconies are all renderable splines.
None of the walls are aligned with the home grid so I have had to make custom grids that are aligned with each wall of the house, I then activate it to work on the designated wall.



Custom grids

Texturing
The whole house has a multisub material and each wall of the house has its own texture. Firstly I align the viewports to the wall which helps me with the custom grids mentioned before. I then take a screen-shot and go to Photoshop, there I put the screen-shot in a superior layer to the texture then lower the layer opacity. Using that reference, I combine textures of my own wall collection, draw cracks and dirt, then of course add the DBT Café logo. The mapping is made with planar maps that embrace the whole wall and then I fix the necessary areas later with unwrapUVW. For the floor I used the same sequence, where I take a screen-shot of the top viewport and I use it as reference in Photoshop to draw the pavement and the asphalt.
The curtains and awnings are made with a gradient ramp map with some noise and the the sky is a photo with the Photoshop filter, dust and scratches.

Lighting, Rendering and Post
The scene is illuminated with a yellowish target direct light with area shadows and the VRay skylight with a very blue color. Between the target direct and the house, I have modelled some non vissible buildings to cast shadows on the visible buildings. It is very advisable to use the light viewport to see where will fall the shadows on these buildings.
I have used global Illumination in VRay with an antialiasing Catmull-Rom for the final render. I have used very little post production on the image, only to darken areas, add some sharpen mask, contrast and of course, the signature.
The completed project took approximately three weeks of work where most of that time was dedicated to the textures, as I didn't have my Wacom Intuos and I had to draw with mouse... never again!
Hardware wise, I use a PC Pentium4 2.5 Ghz with 512RAM, Geforce4 MX 440 and a Sony Trinitron 17” monitor. During creation of the image I listened to a lot of Radiohead, Coldplay, Muse, Cocteau Twins, XTC, Pat Metheny and Sakamoto.