Final Presentation

Theme: Teashop (it's like a coffeeshop, but only tea)
Inspiration: I like tea and being comfortable with said tea. I like coffeeshops but not coffee. Thus the teashop was born. I also like bakeries so it's that too. I wish this place existed. I would go there all the time.
Things I'm happy with: Moody 'tude lighting, glass, textures, it's done?
Things I could have done better: AO done broke, weird lighting error, metal doesn't work, wanted to have ivy / dust particles / god rays in scene

Final Renders + Animation

Memories~~

Concept Art

Initial Blocking

WIPs 

Weekly 12

I'm about 99% done with my textures, the last thing I need to do is work on the table objects such as the opened book, pencil, napkins, and pencil. I'm also getting bizarre results with my microwave in the back having warped textures (the walls too, holy cow what is happening?!) Not sure what's causing those issues honestly. I thought the issue was when I tried to add a displacement map to the walls, but I removed the map and they still didn't change. I re-exported the wall from a previous save and imported it in my scene and it was fixed. If I have time, I will go back and refine my textures, but at this point lighting is currently a big issue that I need to focus on.

I've been debating whether or not to remove my directional light. One of my biggest problems is blown out lights near the windows. In the render shots below I'm only using area lights and physical sky, which seemed to have lighten up the back of my room better without excessively blowing out the front portion. The biggest difference is I couldn't add Light Decay to the directional lights, but I could to the area lights so I may just have to tweek some of those values.

23 minutes

32 minutes (AA settings at 4)

Forgot to check minutes

15 minutes

Render Quality

Weekly 11

This week I've been working more on getting my textures done and finalizing my render settings. I've been struggling with reducing noise and render time, it bounces between 10 and 30 minutes depending. I've also lit my scene up more by replacing my spotlight with a directional light and adding track lights.

Default render settings, render time 14 minutes

AA increased to 4, render time 28 minutes

Reduced samples of tracklights to 1, exposure cranked up to 2.0, render time 20 min

Colored Teapots

References eyyy

Weekly 10

I've underestimated how long texturing would take me, why do I do this. This week I've been mainly focusing on texturing more of my objects. I've changed my render camera so now I have less to texture (don't need to texture any of the doors or windows, yaay!) and I've cut the frames from over 600 to 400 exactly. I've been messing with the lighting too, which hasn't been going too well but I'll just need to spend more time with it. Following this tutorial:

https://support.solidangle.com/display/AFMUG/Lighting+a+Room

I need to figure out how to optimize my render time because one frame took me 40 minutes!

Next week is going to be the same dealio, lights and textures. Texturing-wise, I'd like to focus on either the teapots in the back or the tea containers. Best case scenario I complete both of them.

Reference ahoy!

Weekly 9

This week I've been working primarily on getting textures done. Mainly I've been making very basic textures for a lot of my objects so they aren't gray, then I will go back and edit them when I get the chance. Once I do get around to more intensive texturing, I will be focusing on the chairs and tables + tabletops. I am also working on optimizing my scene by removing maps that are unnecessary (ex. specular / metallic / roughness that has pure white maps).

Next week, more texturing!

(For some reason, Arnold would not render my scene in the labs, though it renders fine at home. So I can only add screenshots for now!)

More references:

Weekly 8

This week I've spent most of my time texturing. I've had some scary Substance Painter problems the past couple of weeks resulting in my computer crashing and the fan making some terrible noises but I think I've solved them for now! (update Nvidia drivers + latest version of Painter instead of 2.2.0, which means no working in the labs unfortunately).

I started off by making some simple textures for the objects in my scene so my scene as a whole doesn't look as empty and I can compare the colors between each object, changing them up as needed. Since the UVs are complete, I can just go back to these files later and update them when I get to them. Aside from making simple textures, I focused on the chalkboard and cups. I also managed to get my light working (altered my spotlight settings and added a ceiling, which helped a lot).

Examples of lighting:

References for chalkboard and table / Ideas for paintings: