Problem:
Recreate a picture, creating models, shaders, and lighting from scratch.
Solution:
It took a long while to pick a picture to use for this project. Searching for still life photography, for example, included vegetation in most of the results. Eventually I found this photo, which is from https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-padded-brown-wooden-chair-4067756/.
The image depicts a chair in a room with a wood floor. There’s two picture frames above it, one of which is slightly askew. Light shines in at an angle, but the room itself is still well-lit.
I decided to start with the chair, but I wasn’t quite sure of the dimensions from other angles, so I did some searching. I found a chair that looks a lot like it at https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32814122240.html to use as a reference. I started with a cube for each separate part of the chair, and through a lot of extrusions, vertex manipulations, bevels, and perseverance, I got something that looks a lot like the chair.
For the wood part of the chair, I used spacetime noise stretched out on u to create some grain, and used a multiplication node to add in the color.
For the cushions, I mixed some fractal and billow noise together for the bump. I also fed the noise into a mult with the base color to get the final color. It took a while messing with the specular and sheen components of the shader to get a result that looked close to the original (it kept on ending up far too bright).
For both the wood back and seat of the chair I had to do a camera projection of the UV’s to avoid distortion.
For the floor, I stretched out a block, beveled the edges, instanced it once to get another at an angle, and did a whole lot more instancing. Similar to the floor, I fed in stretched out spacetime noise, but I added a color jitter node set to object for the type to get variation in the floorboards.
Like I said, a lot of instancing.
The back wall was simple enough (just a plane), and then I added another block along the bottom for a baseboard. Neither had anything fancy going on with the shader graph, but it took a bit of time to get the baseboard to look properly flat in color — I ended up bumping diffuse roughness up all the way.
The picture frames were made from boxes scaled up as well. The frame material doesn’t seem to reflect light — they’re nearly completely uniformly black — so I reduced the specular to almost nothing.
The socket that’s barely visible behind the chair was a pain, but I found a reference that looked like it was from the same room and used a bend deformer on a plane to start the front of one half of it, mirrored that half, and extruded it all back. A whole lot of edge loops and extrusions later, and I had something that resembled the original. Massive pain for something that’s barely visible in the scene.
Booleans may or may not have been involved in the creation of this socket.
For the material, I had a lot of trouble getting the material to look right. I ended up using off-white for the base color, and a very light manilla for some subsurface scattering.
The room had a lot of ambient light, so I scaled up a large area light and placed it above.
To get the highlight that streams in between the picture frames, I used a spotlight with a barndoor to control the beam and a globo to try to get closer to the source image. The barndoor was done through trial and error, since I couldn’t find a way to represent the barndoor in the editor — it had to be adjusted, rendered, and adjusted again to try to get closer to the source. I fed in a circular ramp and some billow noise to the globo.
Finally, for rendering, I used an aspect ratio of .67 and set up a camera with the same ratio, since the source image was vertical.
And here’s a few other angles.
The project can be downloaded here: https://clemson.box.com/s/zjjutpsvlog2ido4718pgmvo1nx1tm2k