Introduction

The work on the “Loft” scene was carried out in tandem with Ronen’s 2011 Summary on the forums, and inspired by the work of Insomnia Architects & MIMO Studio from Poland. I loved the Loft project very much and decided to give it go myself… modeling and rendering it.

Units

Working with good reference plans is very important, and keeping within real world units (no matter what you use… mm, cm, M) and have all elements scaled and proportionate to the scene. Here is my units setup.

Linear Workflow

I usually use LWF in my work, although it seems many have their own take on what LWF (Linear Work Flow). There are several tutorials on the internet where you can read about it – one of the best was posted on this blog at Linear Workflow Made Simple by Matt Gorner.

Modeling

Before I begin the 3d modeling, I prepare a 2d blueprint lines model serving as a base. I then use extrudes to push this base into 3d form and further detail the structure adding bevels and chamfers were needed to enhance the look.

To create the wall openings I use a method that some of you might consider odd – I use Pro Booleans for this… For me it’s the easiest way.

Here you can see how a small chamfer is used to soften the edges of the wall that aren’t perfectly sharp in real life.

The floor was modeled using the great Floor Generator plugin. It has been featured on this blog so many times, and for good reason! Check out Bertrand’s write-up about it at Using Floor Generator Script. It would be nice to see this work on vertical surfaces (or any other type of surface) too.

Lighting

The main lighting source for this scene is a VRay Sun that work in tandem with a VRay Dome light loaded with an HDRI map.

I also added VRay Lights as Skylight Portals to the wall openings, to help with the faster calculation and light spread in the interior.

You can see my lighting setup below…

Viewpoints / Cameras

Picking good viewpoint… good compositions is super important , and so I setting up the cameras. I use the VRay Physical Camera due to the correlation with real-life camera settings.

Notice the color balance tweaks I made due to the warm nature of the scene having lots of wood… I use WB to counter balance that for the end result.

I great advantage we as CG artist have vs. real world photographers is seeing behind walls! Like Superman!!!

You can only push the wide angle so far before it looks way too odd and you still did not capture enough of a given room. Here’s where the camera clipping plane feature comes to your rescue.

I place the camera outside the room behind the wall and the clipping plane was pushed forward just so I pass that wall slightly and so uncover the room interior for the camera.

Furniture 3D Models

Many people asked me about the furniture I used in this scene. Did I model them myself, or purchased ready made models?

Well… there’s nothing wrong with buying ready made models (as long as you do keep trying modeling some yourself, perfecting your skills… you can learn a lot form the works of other this way).

I did some shopping prior to my work on the “Loft” scene, and tested the models in it. Some of the 3d furniture models were made by Bertrand Benoit (BBB3viz). He is a great inspiration to me and his work is of the highest quality in our industry.

I also used 3d furniture models by designconnected which I like to highlight here. Using them for the first time I was very glad to find they were well modeled and have great realistic quality… in textures too (even though I tweaked those for my own purpose and taste). They are also very affordable, which is super important for me and anyone else I assume. The balance between modeling it yourself vs. buying them depends on that greatly, so this helps.

In this experiment I found it very important to use professional models, which made ??my work faster. I used 5 DC models : Cityloft Sofa, Lanshire Clock Works Dancer, Ligne Roset Africa, BD Barcelona Flamingo and an N/A Pendant Lamp.

Materials

Sofa Fabric

The material node view…

One bump on the top right and variations of the diffuse color.

Wood

The material node view…

Wood Floor

The material node view…

I used the MultiTexture plugin for creating the variation in the floor wood planks.

Rendering

Here’s the viewport camera view selected just before I went to rendering the final image…

You may find that the irradiance map method quality is low, but it can be easily solved if you increase the number of the global subdivision multiplier…

In the original rendering I used the value 3. But I re-rendered with the value of 8 which gave me a result of walls without spots…

I might have started to low, but this is none important… what you need to know is that you can and should play with the settings to learn what they do and thus better optimize your rendering process (or get a monster computer and just use brute force… even then you will quickly demand more of your workstation, since we always want more – so learn to optimize).

Here is the new render with the global subdivs multiplier at 8…

Post Production

I did very little post production in this project and aimed for getting it all done in pure render as much as I could. I do output some passes just in case I need them, but mostly do a few color corrections and that is it!

This is how it came out the renderer.

And this is the result of post-production. To simulate the light from the lamp I used Magic Bullet for Photoshop.

I hope this article helped you in some way. I enjoyed writing it and please feel free to ask anything you want in the comments section below.

Thank you very much,

Matheus.