Texturing, Lighting & Rendering 'The Church Of Light' in 3ds Max

In this tutorial, Pratik Gulati walks us through how he created his stunning image, 'The Church of Light', using 3Ds Max. He covering all of the modeling, material creation, lighting, render passes and the post-production techniques used.

A Brief History

The Church of the Light is a small structure on the corner of two streets in the town of Ibaraki, in Osaka, Japan. The architect, Tadao Ando, is famed for using Zen philosophies when conceptualizing his structures, and one theme he expresses in this work is the dual nature of existence. The space within the chapel is defined by the strong contrast between light and solid. In the chapel, light enters from behind the altar through a cross cut in the concrete wall, and it's at this intersection of light and solid, that the occupant is meant to become aware of the deep division between the spiritual and the secular within themselves.

Modeling

As you can see in the image below, the geometry itself is actually very simple - walls on all four sides and 1 major window at the back-right through which light enters. All of the furniture models in the scene were created using simple box-modeling techniques, and once modelled, I used instancing to create multiple copies throughout the church.

Step 1

To model the bench, first create a plane in the front view.

Step 2

After converting it to an editable poly, select the lower edge and shift drag it downwards to extrude it as shown.

Step 3

Select these two edges and connect them with 3 divisions. With that done, tweak the vertex positions as shown in the final image below.

Step 4

Repeat the above process to complete the two horizontal sections shown.

Step 5

Here we can use the bridge tool to easily connect up these two pairs of edges.

Step 6

With the main shape created, apply a shell modifier to add thickness to the object. We want the different sections to end up roughly square - the settings that I used are shown below.

Step 7

As we should do with all photorealistic models, we now need to chamfer all of the corner edges to give our model a beveled look. My chamfer settings are shown but the important thing is to ensure that it looks right to you!

Step 8

After duplicating this object twice, I also created the back support and the seat itself using exactly the same techniques described above. Our bench is now done!

Step 9

To model the podium, first create a box and convert it to an editable poly.

Step 10

Select 3 of the side faces and inset them as shown.

Step 11

With that done, delete the forth side polygon.

Step 12

Now select the inset faces and extrude them in slightly.

Step 13

Now, just as on the chair, we need to go in and chamfer all of our edges.

Step 14

To finish the object, add a cube on top of the model, a cross on the front and a cube on each side, making sure to chamfer the edges. The other objects in the scene were all constructed using a similar polygonal modeling method.

Rendering an Ambient Occlusion Pass

I added in an Ambient occlusion pass using Mental Ray to add more depth and weight to the final render. I personally prefer Mental Ray for this as it's fast and, in my opinion, gives a better result than the Vray dirt shader.