Here’s a project created & rendered in Blender 2.40 – a “Sitting Room in Aspen”…
This is pretty well done. Nice atmosphere in your scene.
But i have one crit : the exterior (the trees) could use some more blur, because it seems to be a painting and not being the outside of the scene.
Depth of field is what i mean in fact.
Nice render anyway.
Man, I’d love to live there! Your trees look like they are falling away from the camera.
It’s a very nice composition, although I probably would not have the trees be visible through the skylight because that is already “the brightest part of the scene” and your eye tends to get drawn up there.
As a photographer I would say that you are using a bit too much of a wide-angle lens; there’s some distortion, although not too much. What we tend to do instead is to pull the camera back farther, and use a longer lens.
But anyhow… it’s a good picture. Very warm and pleasant, highly detailed, well-organized. Exceptional decoration and thoughtful, restrained use of light … the gobos on the light are a nice touch, as is the birdcage. You’ve got an uncluttered arrangement that is distributed both left-to-right and front-to-back, and proportionately balanced in each direction. The light temperatures are good … warm, diffused sunlight tones inside; slightly cooler outside sky. You did not forget the ceiling, and you gave a very plausible visual explanation for the lighting there.
You might consider a slightly different treatment of the chair in the left rear of the room. Being a dark, muted upholstery fabric it’s fine, but you know, compared to the other one it’s just a little bit dark, with just a little less detail showing than I would like to see. As such, the cushion on it seems just a little bit to be “floating on air,” probably due to the absence of any opportunities for shadows, and that twinges toward “giving it away” as a digital creation – which, otherwise, it does not readily appear to be.
My compliments on the photograph and its composition, as well as its digital execution. I’d love to sit on that sofa right now with a nice glass of tea and get lost in the early autumn colors . . . This is fine work.
Thanks for the cool feedback – really appreciate it! This is actually my first project in Blender – I recently switched to Blender from Maya & LightWave (my former tools of choice). Still getting used to Blender’s way of doing things…
Wow that´s sweet, is that AO or radiosity? can you post a screenshot of your interface just to see the lamps you are using? 
Edit: What is that book in the table? 
I used a complex spot-lamp setup (front, rear, left, right, ceiling & floor spot lamps) to create a radiosity/light scattering fake. Intensity, size, clipping, softness and samples vary, but remain around 1-1.5 (intensity), 6 (samples), 12 (softness), 1024 (shadow buffer). Front spot along Y axis has no shadows active to avoid shadows from the furniture being cast upon rear wall. All lamps are the same color (a very pale yellow).
Sunlight is mimicked by a spot lamp with cloud texture gobo mapped to color channel (see screen shot for settings). Originally tried a Halo effect on this lamp, but it was a little too much in the final render – so disabled Halo but kept the settings in place in case I wanted to tweak at a later date… Additional bright spot added to illuminate the skylight (no gobo).
Hemi lamp with .75 intensity and a very pale bluish-gray color added to cool the shadows in contrast with the warm lamps.
4 Shadow-only spots added to generate additional furniture shadows in shaded area of room, as well as the plant in the birdcage.
Lamp set-up:
Hope this helps…
PS: The book is titled “Exotic Gardens of the World”…
Woa, I knew it wasn´t simple thanks for the screenshot
My pleasure!
Care to share your process for making the carpet? The material on the blue chairs looks nice too. I always have trouble with fabrics like that. I am especially interested in the carpet. Look forward to your response.
nice lighting, howd you get the leaf like shadows?
nice lighting, howd you get the leaf like shadows?
He already explained that.
I like it, except the background texture seems too “close” (it looks like a poster right outside the windows).
The carpet uses some procedural textures to get a subtle textural feel – I mapped 2 separate Stucci textures to the NOR channel (one hard and one soft), and just tweaked the settings until I got the right feel. Add a cloud texture to the color channel to slightly add some randomness to the color texture, and you’re done!
As for the trees outside the veranda, my intent was to create an area that extends out into a patch of aspens, with the trees beginning just beyond the balcony and stretching out into the background (hence the filtering of the sunlight through the leaves…).
Really appreciate the excellent feedback, guyz – many thanks!!