Preparing Breakfasts with Quixel Suite & V-Ray

Intro

Hello! My name is Mohamed Lotfy (Bondok Max), I was born and raised in Egypt. Actually, I started my career in 2007 almost with some design in Photoshop just for fun and then I discovered my passion working as a freelance 3D artist, but I’m more focused on look development, lighting, and environmentsset modeling. In the past, I have worked for about 8 years at a number of TV-ad studios as a team leader/3D generalist. 

Breakfast Time

I really wanted to practice my skills. I had a lot of fun with this project and even learned some tricks. I tried to make everything as photorealistic as possible. And I was experimenting with several ideas of how to make it more alive and bring a bit of story into it. I was inspired a lot by food photography.

First, I collected references to start my work. I then had to block the composition, set the camera and basic lights to see how far I could take it and then fill the scene with more food and objects. And the challenge here was that it had to be realistic.

I started the modeling process with simple primitive objects like box, cylinder, sphere, or plane, and after that, I convert them (Edit Poly) and start to play with their forms. I like this polygonal modeling method because it allows you to control every point, edge or polygon of your object. And then I make the details in ZBrush to get a realistic look.

For the texturing, I mainly used Mari and Photoshop. Many of the textures I used were from textures.com which really is the best texture resource for me. To create normal maps and dirt mask I used NDO. Some objects in a scene have been unwrapped for convenience. Textures are very important for the surfacing.

One of the most important stages of this work was setting the lighting and positioning the camera. The lighting and camera both play a huge role throughout the whole work, and I think that correct usage of these is the key to creating a great work.

For the rendering, I used V-Ray with global illumination where irradiance map was used for the primary engine in combination with light cache for the secondary engine. I always use linear workflow and more light in the scene to get better results. I also did a few tests to optimize the render time by rendering separate render elements like VraySampleRate to see how anti-aliasing was affecting the scene. Then I used Photoshop for a few improvements as I wanted to create a richness in color and contrast. I used blending modes such as Multiply, Soft Light, Overlay and Screen until I had an image I was happy with.