I was inspired by the Grieghallen tutorial by Tamas Medve
(featured a long time ago on the blog) to try my hand at making his
wet stone pavers before the competition was ever announced.
When the competition started, I figured it would be a good
opportunity to both add to my portfolio while also testing the
pavers in a full scene.
My computer at home is quite old and as such it really can’t handle
large expansive scenes, or scenes with a lot of assets or accessories
so I had to be clever about chosing my camera angle. Luckily I
found a reference photo of the building online which I used as my
inspiration. The angle is suitably dramatic and also limits the
amount of background scenery I would have to build, allowing me
to focus on the lighting and materials and not worry about my
computer dying!
The scene itself is fairly straightforward spline modeling for the
most part. The pavers out the front are a simple texture with a
custom displacement as in Tamas’ tutorial – with a plane of water
put on top to simulate the puddles. The background (and the
reflection in the windows) are free building models downloaded
from 3dsky.org and most of the textures came from my own
personal library, Arroway or Textures.com. The background trees
are a simple forestpack with some zDepth applied in post
production. I made extensive use of the Corona Light Mix as it
allowed me to leave my computer render the scene out once (as it
took forever on my old machine) and then tweak the lighting
afterwards to get it looking how I wanted. I don’t think I would
have had the time otherwise to adjust the lighting in the short
amount of time I spent on the project (overall I think it was 3 days
after work).

A couple of months ago, I stumbled across an amazing project in Sofia, Bulgaria by architects Dimitar Karanikolov and Venete Nikolova (http://www.homedsgn.com/2015/07/21/loft-9b-by-dimitar-karanikolov/). The space itself is a small loft apartment with some really great material and furniture choices. Having just finished the SoA Masterclass, I was feeling inspired and was on the lookout for a small space to practice everything I had learned and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I had spoken at length with Gianpiero about the differences between Corona and V-Ray and as we use V-Ray in the office I decided I would also use this as a platform to teach myself Corona as a render engine.

Modeling took the majority of the time on this project as I was working from pictures and PDF plans, so trying to get everything at the correct scale was a little difficult. The lighting for the scene is just a simple HDRI from Peter Guthrie, and one or two Corona lights for the lighting fixtures in the office and kitchen. Materials were very straightforward to make in Corona, especially with the new PBR workflow in Corona 1.5 – I had a lot of fun making the floor and the concrete box shaders!

Overall the project took around 3 weeks to complete, working an hour or two here and there in my spare time after work.