by Farrokh Tabande, Iran

Hello everyone, Here I want to explain how I made the interior shot of this beautiful Iranian mosque. Please remember this is not the best or the fastest way to make It, It’s just the way I made It!

This is a 200 years old mosque that is located in my home town (Shiraz) and I had the ability to go there and collect any data for modeling and texturing process. So I started to take the pictures and collect all the data that could help me during the modeling and texturing process.

I started to read a book about Iranian architectural geometry to understand every aspect of the shapes; it was so helpful for me! Then I measured all the dimensions of this building.

references

MODELING PROCESSFirst of all done the modeling of the stone columns using loft with 2 shapes and the scale parameter of loft. After that I used a helix to model the twists of the columns. For the lower details I used an spline and added a lathe modifier. Upper detailing is completely done through texture.
There are some lines in the ceiling that holds the weight of the domes (they are called “kar Bandy” in the Iranian architecture).

ceiling

I used a spline and array around the center of the domes to create them (they were renderable splines so I didn’t have to define UV’s for them).

It was surprising for me that they were so precise in 3D world that I could trim them!

For modeling all 3 types of windows I used an 2D Autocad ELEVATION and extrude it (thanks to my dear friend “Hamid Afsharian “ that did the cad drawing for me).

windows

UV PROCESS

After the modeling I started to unwrap the geometries. In some cases I used the pelt tool and after that I used the relax tool to make UV’s similar to the original polygons. After that I render them to texture and use in the Photoshop.

TEXTURING PROCESS

As I said: for the texturing I used the photographs but there was too many reflections on the ceramic parts and also there wasn’t a good lighting condition in the existing mosque and all of the images were very noisy due to high ISO value of the photographs! So I started to paint all the textures with my tablet and I also paint the reflection layer for them.

After that I made the normal bumps (using software Crazy Bump).

texture

Some Test Renders

LIGHTING

Lighting is very simple and I used the directional light for sunlight and vray sky light with a white plane (as ground) that would reflect the skylight.

RENDERING

Nothing so special here, I used the reinhard for color mapping

GI, IR & light cache.

I turned on some render elements for post production (render ID - reflection - refraction - lighting - shadows - sample rate)

This making doesn’t ends here still there is something to share:

I had some problems with colors in my render, so I started to paint the window glasses based on their original color in existing mosque and it made the color and lighting more real!

This is a simple thing but it shows that the architects of this mosque had a deep understanding about something that we call “White Balance” nowadays!

POST - PRODUCTION

For the post production I used the Photoshop again and I used: color balance - Level - hue saturation

To create lens flares I tested many plug-ins but they didn’t work as I wanted, so I decided to make them my own. I used the “vray lighting” render element and deleted the black pixels and give It a motion blur filter and radial blur filter and for the color blending of this layer I used the liner dodge.

To paint some dirt on the bricks I used the “sample rate” render element and turn it into black and white and paint out the unnecessary parts with a custom brush

dirt

I also painted some textures on the stone columns.

pillar

To make a border for the window glasses I used the “vray refraction” and select black pixels and inverse the selection (ctrl+shift+i) and expand the selection to 1 pixel. I hope u like this making and please feel free to contact me if you have any queries or suggestions.