I wanted to practice a little with Yafray, especially lighting the interior of a room.
Well after 3 day with fiddling with the various options and not getting photoreal results. I figured, with the results Im getting I might as well go with the Blender Internal renderer and focusing on mood rather than realism.
There a few minor errors in this image. The wooden floorboards still need some work, and some other minor details. I also need to add some more stuff to this room as it seems kinda empty at the moment.
The fire is quite simple. I created mesh using metaballs which rougly envelopes the logs, then I applied a distortion and a flame shader. I’m gonna post a more in depth tutorial once I do some further tests. (and once I am satisfied with this image.)
Thanks man. Well I meant “photoreal”. I have to admit though, this image looks better when its scaled down.
I was trying to do bounced lighting manually by placing spots and omnis at strategic places, but its really difficult to do, especially if you dont want to mess up your shadows.
Like I mentioned before, I originally started in Yafray, but that was just too frustrating. Then I started to light my scene using mostly area lights, which of course caused render times to shoot through the roof. So now I’m only using omnis and soft spotlights with buffer shadows. And of course Ambient Occlusion.
I rendered the image as a multilayer OpenEXR file, with the AO layer activated, but not integrated into the combined layer. Then I opened the file in Blender and used nodes to composite the layers together and add glow and a subtle DOF.
Looking great so far, I like the mood of the scene alot!
I have a couple of minor crits though. The fire in general looks good, however the concrete type surround takes away some of the realism, maybe add some black marks and general discolouration on your UV map around that area to show where the soot etc has stuck to it rather than having it look like it’s brand new from a shop and never been used before.
Also, on most wood fires that I have seen, the wood is actually kept inside or on something like a metal tray, such as in this link: http://www.lunkersoutfitters.com/fireplace1.jpg
I’m not sure if all wood burning fire places are like this however, but my eyes go straight to that area in your picture and tell me that something doesn’t look normal, so I thought I would suggest it.
I love the left hand side of the room, looks great, but again I’d like to see some tiny bits of use over there, like maybe slight indentation on the seat area of the chair to show that it has been used many times (the cushion looks a little to thick to be able to constantly get back to that shape after many uses) and a slight bits of wear/missing materials on the arms from leaning would be great.
The points about the chair are just nit-picks really rather than suggestions as I was struggling to find many things I would change if this were my project, the scene does genuinly look great and you should be proud of it so far, the moonlight on the floor and the colours of the lights are very near perfect in my opinion.
In the fireplace, has there been any fire before? Because it looks very clean to me.
It needs some blackness on the wall and coal and stuff on the ground.
Think of this: Photorealistic Shading is one thing, to make it photo realistic you need details.
Also, what is that white shade on your fire, it kinda ruins it for me.
As far as I can tell, its only the logs. On the logs I was trying to achieve a “glowing embers” look through use of multiple textures. For some reason it shows up as white. I’m probably gonna have to fiddle with material node editor in order to get a decent result.
By the way guys, apart from the things that need to be fixed, what should I add to the scene?
I was thinking of having a sort of chandelier-type ceiling lamp. But it might seem too intrusive. Perhaps some stuff on top of the fireplace? A picture frame? A plant?
More stuff on the floor? A reading book on the table next to the sofa perhaps?
