This tutorial, will show you how to create a beautiful and colorful retro illustration using Photoshop and 3ds Max for this purpose. You’ll learn some simple but effective techniques that will allow you to create a cool and stylish image.

Final Image Preview

Here is the image we are going to create:

Step 1

Open up your 3ds Max (or your favourite 3D application that you’re familiar with). Create lots of boxes like me by going to ‘Create -> Standard Primitives -> Box’. Their placement is random but they are quite close to each other. Each one has 154mm length and 10mm width. Their height is different for each box but they are all high.

Step 2

Now you place some cameras around. It’s hard to exactly specify where to put them. I created several ones around the boxes. Below are some examples. I believe all of them would work well but I decided to choose third camera (Camera02) for final render so try to position one of your cameras like Camera02.

Step 3

I used V-Ray to render this scene with resolution set to 1280×800px. In its settings I only turned on GI (Irradiance Map + Light Cache with standard settings) and skylight (with pure white color) as well as ‘Reflection/refraction environment override’ under ‘V-Ray:: Environment’. Below are the settings for material. Once you’ve got everything set up hit render.

Step 4

Open up the Photoshop and create a new document with dimensions set to 1280×800px. Fill the background layer with black using Paint Bucket Tool (G). Paste your render and rotate it by 180 degrees.

Step 5

Paste a desaturated texture of sheet of paper below the layer with render and lower its opacity to about 25%.

Step 6

Duplicate your render and go to ‘Filters -> Blur -> Box Blur…’ to blur it. You should obtain this kind of effect:

Step 7

Now create a new layer and paint some huge colorful dots like on the image below.

Step 8

Again, use ‘Box Blur…’ with fairly high radius to blur these dots. Then duplicate blurred layers and set them to ‘Color’ and ‘Overlay’.

Step 9

Now turn on the layer with the original render and set it to ‘Linear Dodge (Add)’. Move it beneath the layers with colors but above paper layer. Also, add in some little dots on a new layer using Brush Tool (B).

Step 10

Finally, you may create a layer like the one below and set it to ‘Screen’. It was created from the same render but I blurred it slightly and changed its color to red using ‘Hue/Saturation…’.

Conclusion

That’s all for now! I hope you enjoyed my tutorial!

5 Comments

• Richie says:

  March 31, 2010 at 8:37 am

  wow.. this is spectacular. I wish I could do this only using Photoshop. I cannot afford 3DSMax
  Will have to try it in blender sometime. Thanks for the wonderful tutorial

  Reply
• shrink says:

  July 2, 2010 at 2:26 pm

  Looks really nice but I suppose this is not a tutorial for beginners who are not yet conversant with the whole interface like to paint those color blobs

  Reply