Making Of 'Furniture Cluster'

Introduction

I got the idea for this image, when i had modelled some furniture for architectural vizualisation renderings and then thought about throwing everything together. I carefully moved and rotated the furniture to build a large cluster. This was actually the hardest part. I've then added a really simple environment - a room with 3 windows(at the right, not visible). To make it more interesting I've cut a hole in the ceiling and placed a biped on top of the furniture. I first thought about creating an own character, but I didn't want to spend that much time on this image, so I've just used a chrome biped. To add some mood I've also added some volume light.

Modelling

I've usually started with primitives and then tweaked them, using Editable Poly. I was trying out the trial version of PolyBoost at this time. It provides some awesome modelling tools - Like Polydraw, Flowconnect, Flowadjust, Looptools, very nice Selection tools and much more.

Take a look at some of the furniture stills:
Chair 1 is made of box primitives.

Fig 02

Chair 1

Fig 03

Chair 2
The curved wooden seat of Chair 2 was done using Polydraw then bended with a bend modifier. To give it some thickness I've used the shell modifier. The chairlegs started out as splines, were then extruded and again thickend by using the shell modifier.

Fig 04

Chair 3

Fig 05

Chair 4

Fig 06

Chair 5
Chair 3 and Chair 5 were initially Editable Patches and were later converted to EPoly. Using Editable Patches you can easily lay out complex curved shapes. The grating of Chair 3 was done using the lattice modifier.Chair 4 was modelled using a box as a base. I've then extruded the back and the 'legs'.

As you can see on this scene picture the room is really simple. It's made of a box with flipped normals. I've then cut in the windows using 'inset' and that's it already.

Materials & Texturing

Not much to say about materials/texturing. I've used photo-textures everywhere; tweaked to my needs. Most of them were free ones I've found on the net (mayang.com for example), some of them are from the 3D Total Texture CDs(good stuff!). Don't know what else to say, but here are some general tips:

Reflective materials(metals, chrome, glas,..) will only look as good as the environment around them. A basic room will make a big differencs already. Also make sure there is something really bright to reflect. White self-illuminatiing planes are great for this. You can also use a HDRI map if you like, but i prefer to create the environment myself in most cases(provides more controll and i think it gives a cleaner look).

Most Fabrics have some short and thin fur all over their surfaces. You can mimic this look by using a material which turns brighter as the surface turns away. In Max this can by achieved by using a fresnel map. It can also be done by using backlighting, but this isn't that usefull in complex scenes in my mind.

Lighting

I don't advise to use skylight in interior renderings. I prefer to use Area lights, placed outside in front of the windows.
I think i provides more control and better results. I've used one area light at the top (sky.jpg) and a second one at the right (windows.jpg). Those simulate the skylight.There is also a direct light (sun.jpg), which is used as the sun.
Furthermore there are some IES lights, but they don't add much to the overall lighting and are just used for decorative purposes.

Fig 08

Sky

Fig 09

Sun

Fig 10

Windows
I've played around quite some time, to find the settings i liked most (clay.jpg). I recommend to do a lot test renderings using only plain materials, low sample settings and a low resulution.

The area lights are using a very bright blue(nearly white) color, while the direct light is using a yellowish/orange color. finalRender comes with a handy feature called 'Area Speculars'. So depending on the scale of your area lights, the speculars are going to change too(speculars are fake reflections). So you basicly don't need white planes if you are using area speculars, but sadly they are a bit slow to render. Anyway, both methods give nice results. If you are using white planes, position them where the area lights are.

Rendering

For interior renderings i'm using at least 5 bounces(1). in some cases up to 10. I'm also using higher multiplier settings, as i would use for outdoor stuff(2). The sample settings are very scene dependend, i prefer using 'absolute resolution'(3) because it's doesn't depend on the overal scene scale and I'm therefor able to use the same settings no matter what scene I'm working on. Notice that the values I've used depend on the units I've set up(cm in my case). Using those values you can locally define the sample placement working with a radius and a ratio setting. With the following settings(4) you can globaly control the density. Although I haven't used the LoD settings(5) in this pic, they are worth to mention anyway. They become usefull if you are working with scenes which habe a lot depth. Using those settings you are able to decrease the samples depening on the z-depth.

Compositing

This is the final step. I've taken the render added a background and the volumefog and did some color corrections and brightness/contrast changes. I could add the background and volumefog in Max itself and render it straight out, but this would mean I need to make additional test renderings. Doing it in post is faster and provides more controll. I've attached the .psd (composite.psd) so that you can take a closer look, if you want.

Notice that this making-of just shows my way of working and thinking. I hope you've found this still somewhat useful.