sunny winter Road scene using v-ray & nuke

Join us as Steffen talks us through the process of creating his tranquil, snowy winter road, complete with cabin and Porsche. Learn how he composes his shot, utilises Megascans, combines V-Ray render elements with Nuke compositing and more!

Introduction

Hello, I’m Steffen Hampel. I am 26 years old, born and raised in northern Germany. I studied VFX & 3D animations in Hamburg and finished it in June 2019. When I mad my first 3D class, I instantly fell in love with the fact that you can create anything. Since then I started working on personal 3D projects in order to get stuff photorealistic. Since 1st August 2019 I’ve been working as a 3D Generalist/Environment Artist for nhb studios, a full post-production house based in Hamburg, Berlin, München and Düsseldorf (Germany).

Composition

For this image I tried to use the classic rule of thirds. On the left third I wanted to place the car in the foreground, and since the viewer direction is leading into the background I placed another object in the right third background. I actually did not know what to place there when I started creating the image. Actually I just played around with snow shaders and then I got the idea to create something out of it. Besides using the rule of thirds, I hand-placed the trees so it would help keeping the eye on the two main focus points, which are the car and the cabin.

Colours and Lighting

To be honest I did not really think too much about the colours and lighting. I just did what felt and looked right to me (also comparing to other images). I just tried to stay close to real life reference.

The lighting of the scene was clearly inspired by a lot of photography from Pinterest. I really liked the idea of long shadows on the ground and the contrast from this to the bright snow. From a technical point of view I liked to keep it simple. I just used an overcast snowy forest HDRI for a Vray Domelight and a Vray physical sun. I just placed the sun a bit away from the scene and very low, so I had nice long shadows. To have the shadows not perfectly sharp (which is on by default in Vray) I just increased the size multiplier of the sun. From an artistic point of view I wanted the light to shine bright on the house and the snowy trees. It was a bit tricky to place the trees so they would not block light on the house.

Render Elements

If you work with render elements / AOVs (Arbitrary Output Values) you sometimes have to set them up correctly. For example, for this scene I used a ZDepth pass in order to create subtle depth of field. But by default it is set to 100. Sometimes scenes are not that deep. Like here. I chose the object which was the furthest away from the camera (which was around 45) and then setup the ZDepth channel to 50. It made it easier for me to play around with the depth of field settings in Nuke later. Also, there is a nice feature when working with GPU rendering: Hybrid rendering. It basically makes V-Ray use the GPU + CPU which makes it render way faster. I used this feature here and it made my render finish way faster than using just the CPU or just the GPU (Intel i7 77700k + GTX 1080).

Story

The story behind this scene is just that someone recently came to the cabin for vacation or something like that. That is also why the car is not that dirty and the furniture in the background is not snowy either. Also I wanted the scene not to look like it was some hidden or abandoned place. That is why the street is also worn/used.

Snow

Fortunately the snow on the trees was mostly part of the model (Evermotion), but for some trees I had to enhance it or make it from scratch. I thought about how to create something like that and I basically duplicated faces where the snow should be and scatter some low poly spheres on it. For the Roof I just duplicated the faces, extruded it and played around with vertices + bevelled a lot to make it look smooth. From that far away I could get away with murder! Also the snow shader for the snow on the trees/roof had a displacement map which helped a lot.

Benefits of Using Nuke

For this project I just used Nuke for lens imperfections and the background (simple merge image A over image B). The benefits of Nuke are down to the powerful node based setup. Everything is super organised and simple to understand. Also I love that you can make the node graph always point 90° from one to another. That makes me really satisfied! Also, for CG compositing you have so much power using the single render elements/AOVs. In Nuke you can just shuffle out the channels you need. You can create a completely different image by tweaking the render elements. Here I actually made the reflections in the car windows a bit darker by using the reflection pass + Cryptomatte.

Learning Nuke

It really depends on what you want to achieve. For me it was very important being able to comp my own renders in a backplate / footage. So I learned the basics of CG compositing: shuffling layers, which layer makes what, how to grade/colour correct stuff etc etc. If you want to become a compositor you should probably learn the basics of Roto, Cleanup, CG compositing etc etc. Meanwhile there is everything you need to learn the basics on YouTube. I especially recommend Hugo's Desk. He really shows whats important and always has nice example works which makes the tutorial interesting.

Megascans

I used Megascans heavily in this scene. Firstly, the wooden pillars on the side of the street are actually a 3D asset by Megascans. I used the base mesh and the base textures. But if I just placed them as they were they would not fit into this scene. So I made a blend material. The base material on that blend material contained a very basic shader with slight adjustments on the glossiness and specular map. On top of that I used my snow shader and basically I told the snow where it should be using a V-Ray Falloff node. I could use the local object Y axis and manipulate its graph so the snow would be only on top of everything or slightly over the rest.

Now my favourite part! Quixel Mixer! I actually made the street in mixer, but I never used any snow materials in it. From the beginning I knew that only need the displacement + normal map AND there were already almost perfect fits from Megascans to my scene. I mixed together some scans from their library. In the end I had 2 main mixes: the noisy snow (red) and the road (blue). In Maya I then applied the displacement maps from Mixer to the planes and for the base shading I used my snow shader. For the House I used different wood textures / imperfections from the library of Megascans. Nothing special.

My only tip when using Mixer is: Don’t only use the materials as what they are they made for. Abuse sandy materials as snow, use concrete as a road, you get the idea!

Inspiration

I find inspiration especially on Artstation, but also on Pinterest. I look a lot for real life photography. Basically I’m browsing trough Artstation every day to see nice artwork.

Seeking Feedback

I ask my experienced colleagues for feedback but I also post stuff on Facebook groups and Discord servers. If I had to give a percentage to those categories it would probably be something like 30% colleagues, 60% Discord and 10% Facebook.

Additional Tips

Always stay close to real life reference and do not rush projects! I tend to rush projects in order to finish them but without a better result.

Future Work

I always try to get closer to photorealism and especially in full CGI scenes. I am currently working on an animated short film with a Porsche Taycan. I also want to recreate more photos with my current skills. The last one I did was my Tokyo police station while I was still a student so I am curious as to what I can achieve now.

Outro

While I am sad that I couldn’t show anything from my Maya scene or Nuke script (due to losing the files), I hope that you could learn something or steal something from my workflow. I am always open for questions and I really like to talk about workflows in order to achieve specific results. Thank you for reading!