Is this CGI? & would it make a good Blender project?

This is a screenshot straight out of Blade Runner 2049. I saw it and thought it might be an idea to make it in Blender. Do you think the entire scene may have been CG? the white light from the window suggests to me it may be artificial. Would make a good grunge project i think.

Being white only means it’s balanced for that then graded. Artificial, maybe, in the sort of being a set shot rather than location shot. I don’t think it has to be CG. I don’t see any dead CG dead giveaways, but I wouldn’t expect that today either. I haven’t’ seen any making of, so who knows.

But try it yourself. I’m pretty sure it’s going to hard to get a good exposure of the inside (with only two small window lights and no sun) to fill the entire room with light without overexposing the outside to full white. On set there might be additional lighting to balance the scene, but the lights they want us to notice are the window lights.

It’s a moderately interesting kitchen interior, with things such as the Dutch oven which might be engaging … but it’s a terrible photograph – the lighting is all wrong. You’d have to re-light it.

window is so darn white !
look like an emission plane with E = 10 LOL

and the rest of the room is very little lit
so something is wrong with this photo / scene !

happy bl

Big disagree. Nothing was out of place in this scene, or this whole damn movie.

But it’s pretty obviously a practical set. They made a big point out of doing as many things practically as possible, especially environments. There’s not a ton of CGI shots in this movie that don’t intentionally draw attention to themselves.

It’d be pretty fun to re-create!

Not being lighted as an apartment ad doesn’t make it bad lighting. Wth? I think the whole movie is beautifully lit, has its own strong unique style and feel to it. Set design is absolutely amazing. How could that be wrong?

2 Likes

That one frame on it’s own might seem unappealing.
Taken out of context of the actual scene, as in movie scene, it has absolutely no meaning and can’t be judged. If it really was a still scene, one might argue about bad lighting.
But then, what if this picture was called “When the wind blows”?
That really bright window would make sense. At least to me.

So i think the lighting is fine, considering it won’t be an architectural render to sell the latest custom kitchen. I could change the camera angle for the final render. And I think i should try to make it with EEVEE since the low light from one source is going to need a huge amount of samples to kill the noise in cycles. Also that fluorescent light could be on and have a nice warm color…

There is a way to cheat …

Yeah, and they do also on set/on location. On set you can control the lighting on the fake backdrop easily. On location you might block with ND and/or balance out the lighting with additional interior lights. But in this case they obviously wanted things to look more realistic.

Here is what I would use for cheating, and as you can see, you can take it waaay too far (for illustration, I wouldn’t really do this :D).

The tricky part with things like this is now you’re relying on human input to light the scene instead of relying on the light simulation Cycles is able to do by default.

Though it is possible to use Filmic and get a decently exposed interior without causing the outdoors to blow out, but we need to note that in a dark room, the outdoors is going to look almost blinding even with our own eyes (so to make an evenly exposed scene could easily look fake).

Of course. That’s the whole point: it’s not “reality”, it’s a work of art, based on reality. You know the old saying, that all good lies have a germ of truth to them: think of a good work of art as a really good lie.

There indeed was a strong argument to fake things back when Blender’s only render engine was a scanline/raytrace hybrid dinosaur using crappy non-linear sRGB grading, because it was the only way you could get decent images period.

However, now we have Cycles, which over the years has seen advances in sampling and color management/grading/transforms, there is less of a point to fake anything unless doing some ridiculously hard to light scene. You can intentionally fake things in Cycles, but you really need to know what you’re doing so as to not falsify the image, especially when taking into account how speculars have shapes and how light by default bounces around.

Just wanted to chime in and say this is top five best movies of all time. Every single department working on this project was Aces. A++ work all around.

Sapper’s kitchen would make a great project. I love the lighting and set dec.

Having bright exposure of the indoor while having an outdoor exposure well under control. You can’t even get that in real life without “tricks”.

There is also the difference between adequately/realistically lit scene, and that of a deliberately/beautifully lit scene. Realism is pretty much never as good looking as a good lighting artist lighting a set. I guess that’s why movie shots never look like an apartment sales ad. Just checked some ads, and practically all photos with balanced lighting had their interior lights turned on.

Here is one real life approach to shooting with bright lit window: