Making of 'Gloom Room'

Introduction

Ever since I bought my first electric guitar I've wanted to model one, and finally I had the time to do so recently. After finishing it I thought it would be cooler to place it in a scene with other stuff, therefore I decided to model the surroundings. I ended up with my favorite corner of my room, where I spend most of my time, picturing it at various times of the day. In this Making Of I will show you the different aspects I used to create this image. I will go over the modeling of the essential objects, texturing, shading, lighting and rendering (Fig.01 - 02).

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Modeling

Guitar
With the help of photo reference and, of course, my actual guitar, I started with modeling the body first. It was a bit challenging to get this hard surface clean with that cut on it; I didn't pay attention to the flat face edge-loops since it wouldn't make any difference. As you can see they are strangely placed, but don't affect the final look.

The small parts like the pickups and knobs were actually fun to make. The wrinkles on the strap are simply several soft selections with a Noise modifier on top of each one (Fig.03).

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

Other objects
The amp was created using simple poly modeling and, as for the front piece, it's a plane with an Opacity map that I will explain later in the shading section.

The bed cover was modeled from a plane and then exported as an .obj to ZBrush to add some details, although I'm not that satisfied with its final look.

The threads at the end of the carpet are a scattered line with a Sweep modifier, using the scatter compound object with some tweaks to avoid intersection with the floor and to give seamless distribution (Fig.04).

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Texturing and Shading

I took photos of different parts in my room like the floor, the carpet and the oil painting and tweaked them so they were seamlessly rendered.I applied reflections to almost every single material in the scene, turning Fresnel on when needed. This is a rule that I follow when trying to achieve realistic and high quality outputs (Fig.05 - 08).

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

My scene is all about reflections and refractions, considering the curtain and lamp's head piece to refract the main lights that light up the room. The lamp's head piece is made up of two offset cylindrical shapes with a different material for each one. The outer one is refractive fabric with an opacity map and the inner one is refractive thin plastic (Fig.09).

Fig. 09

Fig. 09



And as I mentioned in the modeling section, the amp's front piece is a reflective hard material with an Opacity map. For the guitar knobs I used a VrayBlendMaterial, which was a very helpful and time-saving process (Fig.10 - 11).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Lighting and Camera

This is where it gets more fun for me as this is my favorite process in every scene I do. I rendered over 40 tests throughout the scene trying different light situations and positions. I ended up using three lights in addition to the GI Enviroment skylight (Fig.12):

  • An orange-beige colored Target Direct to simulate the sun in the morning shot with VRay Area Shadows.
  • A bright orange colored Vray Sphere Light in the lamp with the Intensity of 260.0, Yes, 260.0 because it's refracted by two layers.
  • A light-blue colored Vray Plane light to fill dark areas
  • A GI Enviroment skylight set to a strong blue color (49, 156, 255) with a multiplier of 7.0 to 10.0

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

The intensity of each of these lights was related to the VRay Physical Camera that I used, more specifically related to its shutter speed. The higher the shutter speed the darker the image. VRay Pysical Camera has some really cool features like Vignetting (darkens the render at the corner of the image), Distortion to simulate real-life cameras and, of course, Depth of Field which is be used along with the F-Number and the Focus distance. Applied examples can be found on this valuable full-documentation site: http://www.spot3d.com/ . This site helped me a lot in terms of DOF and camera settings. Here are the camera settings I used in the Depth of Field render (Fig.13).

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Rendering

I used Adaptive DMC Image sampler and VrayLanczosFilter with the default settings, and Exponential Color mapping with sub-pixel mapping checked. For GI I used an Irradiance map with the "Medium" preset and Light cache with 1000 Subdivs. The image was rendered at 3K pixels and here are some close-ups (Fig.14).

Fig. 14

Fig. 14



And here's the final image (Fig.15).

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

Finally, I would like to thank the 3DTotal team for giving me the chance to contribute and give back to the non-stop giving community of CG artists. I would be more than happy to reply to any questions or provide any further details about this scene.

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