Hey everyone, this is my first WIP here at BlenderArtists.
So I’m working on an image for my family Christmas Cards this year. The idea is that I’ll create the main scene in Blender, photograph myself, my wife and my cat, composite us into the scene, order a bunch of 4x8s and send them to family in early December. Sort of an environmental portrait.
If I like the end result enough, I could maybe offer the backdrop to my clients for their own cards.
I’m pretty far along with the scene. My latest composite is below along with notes showing the refinements I’m working on.
I did most of the modeling. The floor’s base material and the couch are from the Blender Guru Architecture Academy starter pack. The base tree is from Blender Greenhouse. Could have used Sapling, but maybe next time.
I need a ton of samples, since there are so many small lights in the scene. Pesky fireflies… Used a little over 8000 samples and took about 92 hours to render. The hair system on the rug was crashing my GPU, so had to switch to CPU to render that. Took about 17 hours to render the rug with alpha channel.
At this point, I’m making changes with render layers and regions to keep render times down. I have until the end of November to finalize it. I’m open to thoughts and suggestions, especially about the refinements I’ve noted. Priority will be given to suggestions that render quickly. Haha!
I recommend You to see my thread Confortable Kitchen, You just need to add more lights back the camera, I think it is too saturated of color, the rug is great, hope You get a faster and then a better result.
I altered the pillows to give a more natural look on the couch, added a frost texture to the windows, adjusted the height of the doorway and used Photoshop for the DOF on the foreground objects. I also decided to add some curtains to dress up the windows a little. The framed photo above the couch is the Christmas Card image I used last year, but I’ll remove it for the final print to make room for the greeting text.
The only thing I’m missing now are the photo portraits.
I also used a technique called mean stacking in Photoshop to reduce noise in portions of the final render. Since my computer is running all day while I’m away at work anyway, before I leave, I set blender to render a region that has a lot of noise and use a different seed value in cycles each time. In Photoshop, I can take the different render regions, combine them into a smart object, and use the “mean” stack option in the Layers panel to average out the pixels in the stack, which smooths out the noise.
This is a region with no mean stacking:
This is a region with mean stacking (5 render layers)
Still a little noisy, but much more manageable. I’ll post a higher resolution version of this to the Finished Projects area when we get closer to the holidays.
