Photorealistic rendering of gallery with glossy woodern floor

Artwork Works in Progress
1

Hi there,

After tinkering with Blender for a few months, it’s time to do a proper project! My aim is to create a photo-realistic animated walk-through of this real-life gallery space:

http://www.xlk.org.uk/ext_images/gallery_real.jpg

I’d love to hear your feedback on some of my plans:

Firstly, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t use YafRay with full global illumination because it’ll literally take weeks to render the animation.

So, I’d like to use Blender’s internal renderer. I think the two most tricky things to deal with will be the semi-glossy, warped floor and the light bouncing off the white walls.

My plan for the floor is to use Broken’s excellent glossy-reflections patch. I’ve photographed the real floor in some detail and I plan to use these photographs to make a realistic texture for the floor.

I’m not so sure how to deal with the lighting. Ideally, I’d like to use full GI and let the renderer calculate all the light bouncing around the room (the real lights are pointed at the white walls so most of the illumination for the floor is light which has bounced off the walls). But I can’t use full GI because it’s too slow. Any hints would be most great fully received!

Thanks loads for reading this post - please do jump in and offer any advice/hints at all. I really am quite new to 3D work but I’m excited to learn as much as possible!

Thanks loads,
Jack

2

You should be able to bake all the nice lighting to texture - if you can figure it out with yafray then good on you. that will definately speed things up.

3

Awesome, thanks for the reply. I’ll look into baking.

4

Hi again,

I’ve taken lots of high-resolution stills of the actual gallery so that I can make complete textures for every surface (except the floor and ceiling). What’s the best way to use these stills? Today I’ve been tinkering with using my photographic textures for the walls. I’ve put sun lamps outside the walls and made the textures alter the transparency of the surfaces (so the bright parts of the walls let through light from the lamp behind the wall). Is this sensible?!? My aim is to use my photographs as the “lights”.

Thanks,
Jack