After three months of using Blender, I am finally beginning to get the hang of things. I enjoyed sculpting and making short animations, but my real goal is to master photorealism. Still a long way to go, but I’m getting better with every project.
I wanted to practice modeling different shapes and sizes, so I decided to reproduce everything on my desk: phone, pen, notepad, bluetooth speaker, and my new drawing tablet. I measured everything to the MM to keep the sizes relative. I figured if I could make individual items look real enough, everything would all come together in the final render. About that, I was semi-right. Which is more than usual for me…
Most of the materials are just basic colors combined with noise textures, color ramps, and imperfections. Node wrangler is a must! And I finally had a reason to play with anisotropic. Awesome learning experience.
Figured out that a screenshot image texture connected to an emission shader does a decent job simulating images on displays. The image for the monitor was an easy choice, as was the phone. And, yes, my lock screen image is off-center on my actual phone, too. Funny, didn’t notice that until I was setting up the material nodes…
For the lighting, I used a sun and an area portal outside of a window with blinds, two point lights (blue and yellow) in the room, and then one more (blue) in the room outside the door. I still have a lot to learn with lighting and optimizing FOV, but it’s getting there. I’ll probably use this project as a learning playground to experiment with more of the settings I haven’t got a grasp on yet.
I’m still new and would love to get some feedback on what went right and wrong. Especially interested in ideas that would put this over the top so I can make the next one another step forward. I thought about modeling more objects, but nobody wants to see all of that clutter…
Thanks in advance for any insights!