Renders

Analysing progress

These are all the rendered images I took as I progressed through my design.

Here you can see an early render of just the chair and the hammer, it is a very noisy image, later on I discovered how to improve the quality of the render to avoid noise and fireflies, by using a combination of render samples, clamping indirect light, using multiple importance for objects and lights, and turning off caustics, in this case we don't need them and it will render quicker without trying to calculate caustics, they are more necessary with really realistic scenes using glass for example.

I like the idea of one of the final renders having a similar viewpoint to this, showing a close up of the chair and hammer so you can see some extra detail.
At this point I had not considered scale of the models, well except for the chair in ratio to the hammer, but considering my room/scene is five by five metres the chair shouldn't be taking up the majority of the room. I tried to make the sizing of the objects pretty realistic, taking into consideration that the character the chair is intended for is a rather wide character, the chair is 1 metre wide, so I think that is plenty wide enough.

Getting more of a feel for the environment now. The main aspects of the scene are now laid out, so it's time to think about extra details and textures.

I moved the hammer slightly so you can see more of it and it is laying down in a more natural way. I also made the red carpet at this stage which looks pretty cool. I made the floor very reflective and I added some more detail to the windows. As you can see the windows look pretty weird at this point and needed a lot more work, things don't always go perfectly the first time round. To get the right look for the windows without using heaps of triangles took a few attempts, but I was pleased with the result in the end.

Here you can see the windows are looking a lot better but still not perfect.

Throughout the project I played around with the textures and materials trying to get the right look. I made the gold material look less realistic to match my theme better, I used my character reference image and tried to match the colours as closely as possible.

I liked the models but I could not get the environment to look right, I couldn't put my finger on it, but the scene wasn't tying together with the models, the scene looked too sterile and a bit too realistic, the scene just didn't gel.

I decided I needed to change the columns because they didn't match my curved minimalist theme. I played around with textures a lot more and I also added torches to the scene.

By adding more colour to the scene and redoing the staircase completely it brought the scene to life and it was beginning to gel a lot better and suit the overall theme much better, it now looked more like a scene from a colourful cartoon style video game with a semi realistic tone.

Here I added flames to the torches for added realism for the scene and added some flags to complete the scene. Although the flags don't look quite right yet because I did not use enough verts in an effort to reduce the triangle count.
I turned down the reflection on the gold again, which I think I have done on nearly every render, to more closely match the colouring of the reference image.
I tilted the camera so you can get a better look at the steps, I really like the floor texture, it reminds me of scenes from Sonic the Hedgehog.
One point in the brief was the chair will never be seen from below or behind, so I used this to my advantage to save triangles.
The carpet on the stairs needs tweaking, it's looking a bit unnatural because of the harsh curvature of the steps.

I think the scene is almost finished now, it just needs some tweaking. I think it is looking good and I am near to the triangles limit, I also don't want to put too much in the scene as I am worried it will be overkill, I like the minimalist approach and it keeps the attention on the chair. I think the bright white light through the windows works well and doesn't distract from the scene, I chose this approach because I liked the look and it saved me from having to use more textures for the world, although I have plenty of textures left on my texture limit. The light through the windows lights the scene beautifully, I added an extra internal light to brighten things upeven more, and to keep the gold looking shiny and bring more attention to the chair.