Loft Living

Here’s an early WIP for my latest project. There’s still a lot of placeholders in it and texturing to be done. But what do you think so far. Any comments, suggestions or advice will be greatly appreciated.


Cheers, Wig

Interesting concept :slight_smile: The scene doesn’t really have a single focus, perhaps place the table more in the center and add some magazines and such?

Left window is like a magnet to my eye. Big thing near a thirds point with quite hard contrast and other elements pointing at it, so at least to me it wins the first focus battle with the foreground. Probably needs some help from lighting, camera angle, or other elements when you plan the shot later on.



(Thirds from Blender camera)

Thanks both for the advice.

JA12, you’ve taught me something there, about the thirds. Thanks a lot for that, it will make it a lot easier planning the final shots from now. Brilliant. One more thing you say “Thirds from Blender camera”, how do I activate that?

Cheers Wig

Looks to be an interesting room, even in it’s early stages. I’ll look forward to following this thread.

I do agree with JA12 that your eyes, right now, are drawn first to the left window, but I think it has more to do with the unique shape of the window, that draws the eyes.

The heck… Double post.

Composition guides in camera properties



Not that it’s hard to estimate thirds, I just happened to have Blender open and fastest way to show thirds in a screenshot was to drag & drop your image to Blender camera view, enable composition guides for it and then ctrl+F3 to take the screenshot.

Here’s why I thought the eye gets drawn to there



Levels adjusted to show high contrast points. Two of them are near thirds points (both windows). Right window however has a smoother gradation so it blends better. Then the shot has all these lines pointing to the left window instead of the right one, so the eye gets guided there even if the high contrast won’t do it on its own.

I agree that it’s also interesting part in the image at its current state.

Thanks guys, I’m learning so much from this thread.

Well thanks for all the comments and advice. I’ve tried to get the focus more in the middle, away from the window. I think its worked, what do you think. I’ve played with the lighting, It’s almost there. Added a table and some ornaments and finished the stairs. Here is a high sample, low resolution test render for now.


Here’s the Reference pic I used for the inspiration too


I’m working on the sofa at the moment, but gonna have a break. Next image should be a high res, high sample final.

Again thanks for all the help everyone.

Cheers, Wig

Looking great so far. I would make the image of the city you have a bit brighter.

Although I believe the illumination has improved from the early images to the last one (the one with the horse on the table), I believe it’s less realistic. Yes, it does help drawing the attention to the middle of the room, rather than to the window, but I believe it’s too “flat”. Your reference picture has a lot more contrast, a lot more chiaroscuro, which would be a great illumination to achieve in your image.

Great work so far.

Well almost done. Just the arm to sort out on the sofa, do something with the cityscape background and I think it will be dom. Here is my last test render. Oh, I decided to do away with the table and make the sofa the focus.


Cheers, Wig

You posted an update with a new direction before I was set to post these so thought not to post but changed my mind. Perhaps these are still useful.


One easy way to check that the focal point in the image stands out is to zoom way out and see if it still reads or eyes want to look on that area. Another thing to check while at it is the overall visual balance. Can’t see the details so you have to focus on bigger portions. If you have a lot of visually heavy stuff only on one side, then it’s not balanced.

You can see that the table stood out in your previous image and it was balanced. The reference looks like the bright area and big window were considered very heavy so most of other items are on the right. Not having most of it in the center might have been intentional too. I would’ve moved the table a bit towards the couch or moved the camera so that there’s no tangency with the tabletop and the rug.

Like others said, the bright image looked washed out. Clearly pushed to get the table to stand out.



One way you could approach that is from a photography point of view. I’m not a photographer so perhaps those who are can give more accurate information of what is going on.

Exposure is important when taking pictures. Human eyes adjust to bright lights automatically but cameras don’t so exposure needs to be changed depending on what you want to show in the image. Very bright lights such as sunlight create heavy hotspots and easily result to overexposed areas.

Trick to get most of the details to show up is to take multiple exposures (3-5 for example) and then combine those to create one nice image. Tone mapping, bracketing and “high dynamic range” are nice keywords if you search for more info.

Can’t make a great example with just one grainy jpg image, actual tone mapping would use multiple raw images.
A) Original that looks washed out
B) Overexposed to get details in the shadows. Not too much though, it’s probably closer to what the photo would look like when taken from a very bright area
C) Underexposed to get the details on bright areas
D) Combined. Made it quite subtle.

The point of this is to think if you want a photorealistic look that would come straight from a camera, or a photorealistic look that comes from post-processing, and to look at different details in the image which would make it look like photoreal (details in shadows and lights, hotspots).

Thanks for all the help gusy, especially JA12. I’ve called it finished now and posted it in the finished gallery.