Open air bathroom with plenty of greenery

This is a continuation of a project that was “finished” 3 month ago, inspired by the many open air showers that i experienced while traveling through Asia a few years back. This time around i decided to step up the greenery game and use megascans as my botanic garden center.

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First: incredible quality, great models, very nice lighting and mood. There’s nothing I would change about that. One thing I would change however is adding some windows in the walls to take a little bit of that claustrophobic feel. Of course this is just personal preference :slight_smile:

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The atmosphere is so beautiful! I like both - clay and material renders!

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Could you tell us about the lighting done in this project ?
Amazing work indeed

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Thank you aeNiiX, very kind words!
And I guess it is sort of claustrophobic, haha, even with the open air. I did actually have some windows behind the camera to bring in more light, but those were boarded up in order for a more more dramatic lighting to come through the front.

Thank you Loniel, a really appreciate it!

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Thanks KRUTARTH_SHAH, fantastic words!

The lighting setup for this is very straightforward, one light for the sun, one hdri for more GI. Honestly, I think it could have been done with just a single sunlamp, because of the dramatic angle of the sun coming through and the post processing done in Photoshop there is not much added by the hdri.

My intention for this rework was to try to do everything within Blender, model, texture, render and post, and all worked perfectly until post. Having to wait for the viewer node to update with every change that is made makes it extremely inefficient for time, I do love the cryptomat workflow and the practicallity of working within just one software, but for a project with this much post going on, it is just not practical.

99% of the mood in this image is made in photoshop, as the raw render coming from Blender is quite flat. If you are interested I could do a more detailed brakedown of my post process… Ehm, process…But the gist of it is to use render layers (AO, indirect/direct reflection/transparency) with different blend modes and adjustment layers, as well as some creative brush work to add and subtract light, and one really crucial piece of advice is to learn to use the “blend if” sliders, they can really do some magic if used right!

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I would love to know more about the post process ! Usually the images i render turn out to be a little flat , learning post process better would surely help
Thanks

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@Krutarth_Shah

Here you go, i was going to do a step by step with images, but then i realized that that would be a huge, dark, time-killing hole, so i made a video to explain my process.

Let me know if there is something that is not clear or you have any questions.

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Great image, wonderful mood and very creative bathroom design.

If you use the viewer node backdrop, you can disable it in the header or the sidebar while making edits. Re-enabling restarts compositing. You can also tweak some performance options.

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Thank you Sanne, I really appreciate the feedback!

And I did not know that about the viewer node, so I will have to check that out, but I can already sense that if I can not get immediate feedback to my edits, it will still be slower than if I were to use Photoshop, but if I were to have an established workflow that I only made minor tweaks to for each project, I can see that being very useful. Also, faster hardware will help, I just upgraded to a Ryzen 5 3600, it is a great cpu, but not close to the multi threaded powerhouses higher up in the Ryzen range that would lend itself to more heavy duty lifting.

What is the secret to getting good sun lighting like in the AO render? I have a similar covered garden scene I had been trying to shine light on forever and it never looks good and takes centuries to render.

I featured you on BlenderNation, enjoy :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I understand, feedback while editing is much nicer.

Congrats to your new Ryzen. Sounds like the successor of mine, a Ryzen 5 2600 from 2018. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the detailed breakdown. It’s really worth a lot seeing how people go from a raw render to the final image.
Also, I don’t think I can thank you enough for introducing the ‘Blend if’ option to me. I’ve been using Photoshop for years and never noticed it.

Btw if you untick the ‘Contiguous’ checkbox up in the header when using the magic wand selection in Photoshop it also selects all areas with the color you clicked on and not just the connected parts without having to go in the menu for the Color Range selection.

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I have been a user of PS for many years and i was not aware of it myself, such a hidden gem!

Thank you for the tip on the magic wand, I will check it out!

WOW! Awesome! Thanks Bart!

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My approach for dialing in the lighting is to add a “track to” constraint to the sun light and have the “target” be an object in my scene that makes sense according to the size of your scene, or composition. Then you go in to your camera view and rotate and move the sun around until you find a light that you like. I hope that makes sense, if not, let me know and I will clarify with another video.

Also, don’t be afraid to crank up the strength of your sun so that the lighting really shows (without blowing out your scene, you still want to see the details of your objects) and then you can dial the lighting back as you see fit.

This is more the area where I was having problems. Cranking up the sun gives much more noise and much longer render time without a real improvement to the look of the scene. I had better and faster results with an area light using constant light falloff node… but because light originates from the single point of the area light object it was hard to get the really parallel shadows you get from the actual sun lamp. So the shadows were all wrong but the quality of the light and the lack of noise were good and render time was much faster.

Ok, so for my scene, my sun was a spot light, and with the spotlight, you can play with the size, and the size and blend of the spot shape; the smaller the size and the blend, the sharper the shadows, this is my favorite type of sun lamp because it give me a lot of control over the light and the shadows.