While browsing thru Google one day, I stumbled up a image of a Japanese celebration, where they put floating lanterns in the river and watch as they float away, which gave me the idea and inspiration to create this small scene.
The real life lanterns are make out of paper, so the light can be seem thru easily. Some of them are hand painted, and that was the style I tried to apply here.
The construction is very simple, with the petal being the heaviest part of it. The inner geometry for the cage holds the paper art, and the outer holds what I called gates, the green part on the texture. Initially I tried to use just one geometry for the gate and the paper art, but my knowledge in using Arnold is still limited, and I wasn't being able to separate them just using texture.
The with both geometries separated, I was able to create a Arnold material to create a paper appearance for the hand drawn art. This was my first project using Arnold, and it was a big one for my current machine. The final material is pretty simple, but it took a some twiking to make it work.
The final scene became quite heavy for rendering, taking over 2 days of rendering. There are still a lot for me to learn to make the rendering better and faster, even how to make Normals to work when using Arnold
Software used
3Ds Max (Modeling and Rendering)
Arnold (Render)
Photoshop (Texture)