LOFT APARTMENT

The focus of this module is to discover which area of the industry I aim to focus my career on once I have graduated. I will use this brief to gain a better understanding of industry techniques and the workflow in order to produce a showpiece for my portfolio, which will be relevant to my chosen industry.

My interest lies in 3D visualisation, specifically architectural visualisation, which gives clients the ability to see a realistic image of their architectural designs before they are built. With this in mind, my aim is to produce a loft apartment consisting of an open plan kitchen and lounge, with a bedroom and bathroom upstairs. It will have an industrial finish featuring exposed brick walls, raw wood and metal.

I will be using 3DS Max to model, texture and light the apartment, specifically I would like to try HDRI lighting and will be using mental ray as the renderer. When setting up my renders I will be focussing on the composition of the scene, which will help add realism by creating a composition that would be seen in real life instead of trying to show everything in one image. To enhance my images, I will use multi-pass rendering to give me more flexibility and reduce the possibility of having to re-render, which will then be composited together using After Effects or Nuke adding subtle effects, such as dust particles, light rays and colour correction.

WEEK ONE - TWO (30.01.17 - 12.02.17)

Like every project, I started with research, primarily looking on pinterest, and created moodboards for every room that will be featured in the apartment beginning with the general style and layout (below). Theses images show the industrial style that I will replicate in my design by featuring raw brick walls, a metal staircase and beams and big, mill like windows. Much like the image below (top-right), the bedroom will be upstairs like a balcony with a railing.

Downstairs will feature an open plan kitchen and lounge. The lounge in my design will be smaller than those pictured below but will include similar furniture with industrial styled lamps and shelving. I like the addition of blankets and cushions trying to make the apartment more homely.

The kitchen will include an island, like those below, including a tap on one side and seating on the other with metal stools. I also like the way the pipes and beams are visible following the industrial theme, which will also feature in my apartment design.

Upstairs with include the bedroom and bathroom of the loft apartment, similar to those pictured above. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the bathroom will only have a few industrial style features such as the sink counter and raw wood flooring, displayed above. Similar to those shown, my bathroom will be reasonably small and just big enough to fit a bath.

Also upstairs will be the bedroom with inspiration from the images below. The apartment bedroom will be big enough for a double bed with usual bedroom furniture. I like the use of everyday objects for side tables, such as a stool or pile of books and the way items are resting on the floor with the only thing keeping it welcoming being the bed with lots of cushions and blankets.

Following this research, I created a to scale floor plan used to map out where furniture will go and ensuring the space will be big enough to move around comfortably. The only room fully closed off will be the bathroom, the rest will be open plan with a railing at the edge of the bedroom.

From this floor plan I then began the modelling process, beginning with the shell of the apartment, including window, doors and stairs (below). As you can see, the layout has changed slightly regarding to the position of the stairs and doorway. This is due the stairs needing more room than anticipated which has caused the downstairs door to be moved into the kitchen.

I then started by mapping out where the furniture will lie by getting measurements and using basic boxes in each room (below). This will help me in the long run by giving me a starting point and helping me visualise the final product.

KITCHEN

LOUNGE

BEDROOM

BATHROOM

To finish off the planning of this project, I have created a gantt chart (below) to show how I plan to complete my project in the time given. As you can see, I have allocated a week to model each room, however the rooms don't need to be modelled in the specified order.

WEEK THREE (13.02.17 - 19.02.17)

Now that all the relevant planning has been carried out, as my gantt chart shows, it's time to start modelling. Although the gantt chart details that this week will be dedicated to modelling the kitchen I have decided to start this off with the bathroom. What started out as boxes has been turned into a bathroom which is ready to be textured.

The following renders are test renders using a simple daylight system to look specifically at the modelling and check for any errors in the topology.

Below are renders showing the bath and shower specifically. The bath will be textured to give it a white, gloss finish to look as though it is made of acrylic. The shower and taps will be textured to looked like polished chrome, which will be slightly darker than usual.

The wireframes show the topology of the models (below) and as you can see the shower and taps have been made up of mainly cylinders which have been converted to editable polys so that the mesh can be manipulated into the required shapes. The bath was created from a box and also converted to an editable poly to adjust the shape and chamfer all sharp edges as there are no sharp edges in real life.

Below are renders of the towel radiator and toilet, which both have chamfered edges. The toilet has been made up completely of boxes which have been manipulated and TurboSmoothed to create a smooth surface. This will be given a white gloss texture to mimic a ceramic material. The towel rail is made up purely of cylinders, which will be textured to look like polished chrome similar to the shower.

The following images show the whole sink area made up of a mirror, sink, taps and counter with shelving. The mirror is a simple box with the front face inset and pushed inwards to create a simple frame around the edge, which has then been chamfered and will be given a mirror texture. The taps are the same as those for the bath and shower and will be given the same texture to keep consistency. The sink was produced using a sphere as the starting shape with the top half of the polys removed. Once the desired shape had been achieved the mesh was shelled to create the thickness of the model. The shelving counter is cylinders and boxes which have been chamfered. The shelves and counter top will be textured to look like concrete slabs with blackened steel pipes.

These are the main models required for the bathroom, although there are still a few minor elements to add, such as towels, soap and toilet roll, however, it is these small objects that will add extra detail and realism. The image below shows all the models within the bathroom and the scale of the room There will also be a glass panel in between the shower and the towel rail.

WEEK FOUR (20.02.17 - 26.02.17)

This week was dedicated to modelling the kitchen, based off of my mood boards from week one. My design has changed slightly since creating the floor plan. The kitchen will now have an island where the sink will be, along with seating at the opposite end. The rough layout can be seen in week one - two in the form of blocks.

I started off by creating the AGA. I chose to incorporate and AGA into my kitchen as opposed to a sleek, electric oven. I feel like an AGA would add to the industrial look I am going for. Below you can see a render and wireframe to show the topology of the model. This will be textured with a glossy finish and hints of metal. I will use the cloth modifier to drape a tea towel over the top rail. I am aware that the lighting is slightly patchy in the wireframe image, however this isn't the finalised lighting and I will do lighting tested later on into the project.

Next I made an American style fridge-freezer based off of a SMEG model, which is primarily made up of boxes. This model will be textured either matte black or silver depending on the colour scheme of the rest of the kitchen. Texturing will begin after the whole apartment has been modelled.

The below images show renders of the island from both sides. The sink will be directly opposite the kitchen worktops and will be silver metal. The stools will also be metal, continuing the industrial style throughout. The island also has addition storage on both sides.

The following renders show wireframe versions. Instead of using the boolean tool to create a hole for the sink in the worktop I added extra edges and removed the polygon to create cleaner topology. As you can see all the edges have been chamfered to increase realism, particularly when models are textured.

And finally I populated the kitchen shelves with pots, pans, plates etc. I opted to have shelving in my kitchen as opposed to cupboards so it looks busy, trying to keep away from a sleek, tidy apartment. I then added hanging bulbs above the island which will be wrapped around a wooden beam. I will add spot lights above the shelving and around the room to ensure the whole room will be lit.

WEEK FIVE (27.02.17 - 05.03.17)

Just like my gantt chart shows, this week is dedicated to modelling the bedroom. As well I the bedroom, I plan on modelling the rail for the balcony edge. The decor for this bedroom will be heavily based off of Urban Outfitters home furnishings style, which has a raw industrial feel to it. I want everything to be out in the open much like the kitchen, therefore, instead of a wardrobe I wanted to have a metal clothes rail, which you can see below. The shelves will be populated with various items, such as plants, candles, lights...

From looking at research on pinterest I liked the style of low beds/ beds on the floor. This lead to discovering a more industrial design using raw wooden palettes as a bed base, which I have decided to include in my design and can be seen below.

Both the pillows and duvet started out as rectangles with a Garment Maker modifier applied. I then used the Cloth modifier to bulk them out and make them look soft and comforting. I positioned the duvet rectangle at an angle so it created the folds as it collided with the mattress. I am aware that there are some glitches in the topology of the duvet however these could disappear by smoothing the mesh further and might be minimised when I have applied a texture.

The final main item of furniture to add to the bedroom was the desk/ dressing table and keeping with my theme I wanted this to be metal as opposed to standard wood. You can see my design below with the addition of a desk lamp (which will have a cable), a mirror and some jewellery holders.

TEST ONE

TEST TWO

TEST THREE

From my initial research into the style of bedroom I wanted, I liked the way the use of lights created a cosy, welcoming vibe in contrast cold, industrial decor. To imitate this feeling in my modelled room I decided to add fairy lights hanging above the bed, framing the many polaroids. However, to complete the vibe I wanted, I had to get the lighting for the individual lights just right.

Below you can see the stages I went through, beginning with test one: adding a target spot light. I as can see (or not) the light is barely visible, which lead to test two: upping the intensity. This was more successful, but you can see that the bulb isn't actually giving out light. So finally in test three I added a luminous glass material to the bulb to give the light that bright center.

So below you can see the whole bedroom set up, one purely natural lighting and another with the fairy lights on. Initially I did struggle with the layout of the room due to way the room only has two full walls. As you can see, the glitches in the duvet topology have been removed with the addition of a TurboSmooth modifier.I would like to add some foliage into the room to give it some life, by adding plants on the two shelves and a floor plant next to the full mirror. I also feel that if I could add a couple of clothing items on the hangers it would add realism and believability to the piece.

WEEK SIX - EIGHT (06.03.17 - 26.03.17)

WEEK NINE (27.03.17 - 02.04.17)

This week was dedicated to texturing the bathroom. You can see (below) that I have added a few extra models to the scene so it looks more homely and less empty. Since these are test renders I haven't used the highest quality settings. There are still some changes I would like to add to this room, such as some labels on the soap and lotion bottles to add a little bit more detail. At the moment I am not completely happy with the texture on the towels, in particular the displacement, which I would like to fix for the final renders. But overall I am quite happy with the style and look of this room.

Now that all the assets have been modelled it's time to begin texturing. This time I started with the bedroom, which required me to UV Unwrap a lot of the assets to ensure the textures would be displayed correctly. Since this module is based more on compositing and VFX than modelling I decided it would be more time efficient to download some free plant models with textures, which you can also see below.

Below you can see the material editor displaying all the textures I have applied in the bedroom...

Although there appears to be a lot of textures in this room, the majority are the polaroids. Because I am using mental ray as my renderer, all the textures are Arch & Design and some of the textures are procedural, for example any metal, plastic or glass elements.

WEEK TEN (03.04.17 - 09.04.17)

Finally I set out to texture the kitchen, which required some unwrapping to texture the cupboards and worktops. However a lot of the assets could be textured using procedural mental ray textures for the glass, metal and ceramic object.

And here you can see the material editor displaying the kitchen textures I made...

I when I render this room I will add lights into the hanging bulbs to light the scene better.

EASTER (10.04.17 - 23.04.17)

WEEK ELEVEN (24.04.17 - 30.04.17)

WEEK TWELVE (01.05.17 - 07.05.17)

WEEK THIRTEEN (08.05.17 - 14.05.17)

Now that all the rooms are modelled and textured I began lighting my seen so I can begin rendering. The previous renders are just using a standard Daylight system. Although this works quite well, I wanted to use a HDRI map to produce the majority of my light. This has taken a lot of trial and error.

Since I am using mental ray, so I can use the university render farm, I added a Skylight in order to apply my HDRI to the scene. Using the setting in the Skylight modifier roll out I can adjust the intensity of the light in the room, you can see the difference below.

Skylight multiplier: 1 Skylight multiplier: 5

As you can see from the above image, the light doesn't cast a shadow when it comes through the window. To create this I also added a Daylight system. The Daylight system isn't being used to light up the scene, just to add some sunlight casting across the room, therefore the multiplier is only set to 0.2 for a soft light. I intend on using the HDR for lighting, however this isn't the exterior environment that I want, so I applied a city skyline texture to a plane outside the window and disabled 'cast shadows' and 'receive shadows' so it doesn't affect the lighting.

The HDRI I was using was just a grassy field with blue sky. Above you can see that the HDRI is causing a green tone across the back wall which, no matter how many settings I adjust, just doesn't go. Therefore, I have changed the HDRI to a city scene, however it is still no the exterior I want, so I will keep the city scape outside the window. So here you can see the final lighting test...

As you can see the render settings are still reasonably low quality and there are some adjustments I would still like to make within the scene, but I am happy with the overall lighting.

Here you can see the lighting set up...

The above image displays the Skydome, Daylight and HDRI within the scene. The HDRI has been applied within the environment settings and using the Skydome. As you can, it is visible in the scene, however it appears to be extremely bright, but this is purely being used for lighting purposes and the plane is being used to show the exterior environment. The HDRI needed to be bright in order to light the whole room. The Daylight is then being used to add the shadows when the sun comes through windows.

Unfortunately, in these weeks I focussed my time on my master project, which had a deadline midway through this module. You can see the development of the master project in the relevant tab at the top of this blog site. Although I did manage to model most of the assets for the living room...

As you can see, the majority of the shelves are still empty and so is the table. I feel the sofas would benefit from some cushions and a blanket draped since my cushion simulation doesn't look the best. This room still has a long way to go.

Similar to weeks 6-8, I took the two weeks in Easter to work on an evaluation report, in relation to the master project, in order to reach all my deadlines. This meant I could focus the remainder of my time on this project alone.

This is the final week of the module. The plan was to have a full apartment in the final sequence, however due to timing and issues occurring, I have decided that I will only show the bathroom and bedroom of the scene. I will complete the full apartment for my showreel, however for the purposes of this module I would just be repeating the same skills. For this brief I am using multi-pass rendering into an exr file, where I will use Nuke to composite the passes and make some adjustments in post-production.

Initially my plan was to use the render farm to render camera moves instead of stills, however even with the render farm it was taking 3 hours a frame. Because of this, I decided to render stills and add a camera move in post production.

Setting up a scene for the render farm isn't so easy and I had some problems with my first renders...

As you can see, there are no windows in this room, so to light it I added 4 free lights that emit light from a disc shape to light up the whole room, like a bathroom with spotlights. Below you can also see the textures for this room in the material editor...

There aren't as many textures for this room compared to the bedroom because, again, I have used procedural mental ray materials for all the metal and the ceramic, which make up the majority of the scene.

The above images are the exr renders of my scene, and as you can see there are some issues. The bedroom has a texture map missing due to an issue when setting up the render and the bathroom lights aren't emitting anything so it has rendered dark. This turned out to be an issue with the lights themselves. These renders were multi pass renders which I then put into Nuke, which is where I discovered that the ambient occlusion map is completely white, showing that neither scenes contain any data...

This image shows the empty ambient occlusion render pass.

Because of the ambient occlusion not being present when rendering in passes, I had to use the material override feature in 3DS Max and apply an ambient occlusion texture to the scene and render it out separately, which fixed the issue I was having. I then merged these renders with the rest of the passes using Nuke.

I rendered out my passes into an EXR file, which I then took into Nuke. First I started compositing my bathroom. By adding a LayerContactSheet node I could see all the passes I had rendered (see below)...

I then went on to shuffle out the different passes so I had control over each individual element and combined them together using Merge nodes. I also had control of their strength by adjusting the mix values in the respective merge properties. Here you can see my tree...

The compositing is done in the top half and the bottom half is how I created a post production camera move, a simple pan down. As you can see, I added some colour correction above the merge nodes so that they only affect those specific passes. I added a Reformat node before rendering to make the sequence 1920 x 1080.

A similar process was then done for the bedroom. I added a LayerContactSheet to check all my passes had been baked into the EXR file (the black one displays shadows visible in the alpha channel) ...

And I then went on to shuffle out the passes and composite them together selecting the relevant blending modes in each Merge node. Again the Ambient Occlusion pass is a separate image due to issues when rendering...

Having the separate passes was helpful when the Beauty and Direct Diffuse passes were a little too bright as I could adjust the exposure of those particular passes without affecting anything else.

This is the final composite I will be doing in Nuke. Again you can see the different passes separated out by the LayerContactSheet node. You can also see that this image has been rendered out at a different aspect ratio, 3000 x 1080. This is because I was already aware I would be rendering stills and wanted to add a post production camera move, so by rendering the still wider, I was able to get more out of the camera move...

Then I used Shuffle and Merge nodes to composite the passes together and make any other adjustments. Here you can see my tree...

For the camera move I rotated the camera as opposed to a pan since it is a still and the perspective wouldn't change if I panned the camera across.

Nuke was a completely new piece of software to me for this project, so I'm sure that I haven't used it to its full capacity, but I did manage to composite the different passes together which gave me more control over the different elements. I'm sure if I had more knowledge in post production, then I would have got more out of Nuke and achieved a more ambitious composite.

Unfortunately due to time management issues in other modules, I had to compensate by taking time out from working on this module. Because of this I feel I haven't achieved as much as I could have given the time I had. Having said that, I am happy with how my apartment is coming along, although I need to work on my cloth simulation by maybe using different software. I will be using the apartment in my showreel, however I will most likely re-render some camera moves and maybe some day to night lighting changes as opposed to stills.

Here's my final sequence...