Pool Project (Photo Montage) Breakdown

Hi guys, this is last month project from equinox UK. A mosaic company. I think this project is very interesting, Its a very small project, we only need to change the material of the pool wall and enhance the pool water and also the Blink effect on the material. The challenging part is not doing the photo montage, but creating the mosaic material effect as the client want. Its drive us crazy that time, but finally the client very very satisfied with the result.

At first we got the data contain the photo of the pool, the size of the pool and the mosaic material. The mosaic material have very very small resolution and the material not specially made for the rendering, so we have to tweak all of them in photoshop (and i mean a lot!).

Here is the pool photo.

Here is the mosaic material. Almost all the size only 500×500 pixel.

What we did first of course modeling the pool and the area near the pool. We used SketchUp pro 8.0 to do the match photo.

After that we import it to 3dsmax 2012 to do the rest of the job. Since this project using mosaic, and the texture given by the client, we cannot just use mere bitmap because it will look tiling, if u don’t want to look tiling, you will need to create the material in photoshop as the same size of the pool wall, and it will consuming lots of time. Therefore we decided to use floor generator by cg-source.com. This free script really handy when it comes to tile like object.

Here are the screenshots:

This is the screenshot of the 3dsmax viewport

This is the wireframe of the 3dsmax viewport.

This is the screenshot of some material we tweaked. Yes, we crop the material one by one and fix it using photoshop. We use multi sub/object for the material and combine it with material by element modifier.

This is the material list. We create 16 different material for each type of mosaic material. Just to make sure we don’t get any repetitive looks.

Below is the raw render result, its pretty good before we do the post production:

What the client wants is to get the blink effect, and to add some more ripple on the water, to give more volume, and it was a correct demand, volume is everything. To get the blink effect we simply use magic bullet diffusion and star filter. The rest we enhanced using color balance, hue saturation channel mixer. Nothing magical and nothing special about the post production process.

Here are all the final images:

Thanks to Paul to give us a great opportunity to do this project, we are so excited to do it.