Modelling Thoughts

You may already of thought of these, but here are a couple of ways of improving the realism of your representation, and at the same time as making things look generally better.

Depth of field

When rendering in 3DS Max, you can set the camera properties to produce a short depth of field. Using a very short depth of field for the render lets you recreate an attractive photographic technique, makes it look more convincing, and saves you some work with detail for parts that are out of focus:


Here's how to do it in 3DS Max:

And a gorgeous video that uses such photographic techniques (this is all CG):

Remember to use this effect on your original photograph too, so they look the same. You can do this with an DSLR camera (anything that lets you set the aperture) and make it as large as possible. More info here: http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/fototech/htmls/depth.html

Or alternatively, cheat and use photoshop to blur the background out, but try to make it look good.


Textures and Bump Mapping

Also handy is using the bump mapping and textures to give the paper some roughness, and a papery look (although the original sheet was white, so unless you remake your model don't get carried away with over-the-top paper textures). You could even create a transparent element with a torn paper edge (such as this) to make rough edges to the model where it was ripped.

Here's how to do opacity in 3DS Max:



Have fun!