Making Of 'Mondrian-inspired hotel room'

Introduction

I've always loved to work in different 3D software and experiment with different methods to reach good quality renders. My aim is to consistently achieve artistic and photorealistic results.

I designed this room based on one of Piet Mondrian's artworks from the 1920s called Lozenge. I'm a fan of his art because of the way he uses straight, simple black lines and bold blocks of the primary colors (red, yellow and blue) to create his paintings.

Workflow

Like most 3D artists, I used LWF (Linear Work Flow) as it helped to give a realistic look to my render. To do this in 3ds Max, I went to Preferences > Gamma and LUT, clicked Enable and set everything to 2.2 (Fig.01).

Fig.

Fig.

Modeling Process

I wanted to reflect Mondrian's lines in the bedroom by dividing it up into five different places with different levels that vary across the room to add an interesting look to it. Fig.02 shows a bird's eye view of the room to demonstrate this.

Fig.02

Fig.02

The walls of the room were simply modeled in 3ds Max using a line, which was then extruded horizontally. The ceiling was done in the same way; I simply added some gaps at intervals with a height difference to allow the wash light to go in between (Fig.03).

Fig.03

Fig.03

The window frames and the TV unit were inspired by Mondrian lines too and modeled using the same method mentioned above.
The furniture in the room, particularly the sofa and armchairs, were taken from the Model + Model Vol.7 Library and the bed model was taken from The G Spot by Ramon Zancanaro (the Making Of this image can be found on 3DTotal). I wanted to use this bed in particular so as to break the boxy, square look of the room.

The coffee table and the rest of the accessories were simply modeled in 3ds Max using a low poly modeling method with basic primitives; it was pretty simple and straight forward. I always like to model all the furniture in separate files, and then merge them into the main 3ds Max file.

For the timber flooring I used a Floor Generator script with the settings shown in Fig.04.

Fig.04

Fig.04

After that I converted the floor object to an editable poly and started moving some timber planks up and down randomly to give it a more realistic look. You can also do this using the Tilt section in the Floor Generator script.

The feature wall was created as a series of boxes moving in and out, with a two-tone timber finish and lighting effect. It was modeled using editable polys and by chamfering the edges. I just added a V-Ray light material to the sides that pop out to give it a more textured look.

Camera Settings

For this scene, I used a V-Ray physical camera with the following settings:

• Film Gate: 40
• Focal Length: 20
• F-Number: 8
• White Balance: Neutral
• Shutter Speed: 15
• Film Speed: 150
• Exposure, Vignetting and Depth of Field: On

Render Settings

The render settings were pretty simple. I spent so much time experimenting with the different settings I'd seen on other Making Ofs, that I was able to get a good idea of how to change my own to fit my render machine quickly and easily. Fig.05 demonstrates my final render settings.

Fig.05

Fig.05

Lighting

Again, lighting the scene was pretty straight forward and I only used a couple of V-Ray lights and a V-Ray sun. The two main V-Ray lights by the window were made with a Skylight Portal, and the other lights were normal V-Ray lights with a warm color tone.

I always start with a grayscale render before I start adding any textures to the scene as it helps to get the right lighting setup.

Fig.06 – 07 show my lighting setup.

Fig.06

Fig.06

Fig.07

Fig.07

Texturing

I used basic V-Ray standard materials when texturing the scene. For the timber flooring I put a decent timber texture in the diffuse section of the Material Editor, and then added a grayscale texture of the same map in both the reflection and bump sections.

For the armchair fabric, I used a Falloff map for the diffuse section and copied the fabric map onto the reflection section. I added a grayscale map of the fabric in the bump section. The sofa fabric had the same settings, but in blue.

For the feature wall I used two different materials; one was done with a V-Ray Dirt map and the other one is basically the same thing just without the Dirt map, to support my checker effect (Fig.08 – 09).

Fig.08

Fig.08

Fig. 9_

Fig. 9_

After making a couple of test renders to get the right look, I set the scene for a high res render (Fig.10).

Fig.10

Fig.10

Post-editing

This is the final process, and probably the most important as the final result depends on my ability to create a good artistic look in post-editing. I usually use Photoshop as the main software for this, though sometimes I use others like After Effects or Lightroom, with the Photo-look plugin.

First I started to adjust the brightness and contrast of the image with a quick full-image color correction, and then I started to bring out the colors individually using Alpha renders or maps.

To create the Alpha map, I used two V-Ray standard materials: black and white. I applied the white material on the items I was going to adjust in Photoshop and painted the rest black (Fig.11).

Fig.11

Fig.11

Next I retouched the image using the Burn and Dodge tool to add more shadows and give it more life, and added some lens flares with the Diffuse Glow filter to create that "photorealistic" look. I followed by adding a Lens Correction filter to get the chromatic aberration effect, removed some distortion in the image and finally added some vignetting (Fig.12).

Fig.12

Fig.12

I then made an Ambient Occlusion render of the scene and added it in Photoshop as a layer by setting the blending mode to Multiply. You might need to change the opacity of it, but doing that will add more shadows and bring out the details in your image.

After merging all of my layers, I made some Curves color correction to create my final image (Fig.13).

Fig.13

Fig.13

I hope you enjoyed the process of making this image as much as I did and learned something from it. Finally I'd like to thank 3DCreative for giving me the opportunity to share my work.

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