I enjoy tech-driven art and employing multiple disciplines in my work. When working on projects, personal or professional, I take care to exercise deliberation without overpowering my intuition. My guiding values are integrity and sincerity. I’m a learner. I like to know how complex things work and that drives my can-do attitude. Cheers!
Ok, enough baloney. Now, get back to the pretty pictures.
This is the final (and real) outcome of this project. The "after renovation" so to write. Scroll to the bottom for the "before renovation".
And this is the final render the outcome is based on.
Not bad..not bad.
Below compositing before and after: Best viewed in full-screen mode.
An early version.
Before renovation. Oh, boy, here we go... Roll those sleeves.
All that solid model precision comes in handy for actually building the kitchen, but going from solid models to final renders presents the challenge of retopologizing a ton of geometry and then UVing. One of my goals is to be UV independent here. That requires procedural shaders.
Blender 2.8 is outstanding and beautiful. Shading with Eevee and Cycles is very satisfying because it's interactive thanks to Eevee and while Eevee is not as stable, yet, Cycles is as robust as it gets and in my experience even more so than Renderman for Houdini albeit with fewer features. Let's dive a bit deeper into each and remember that this is just my take on each and my preference.
Octane is supposed to be the fastest of the raytracers I use, but at the end of the day, a scene with 50 materials and multiple lights becomes almost impossible to render on the single GTX1060 I've got. I love octane for simpler scenes. Larger node trees, however, tend to be quite cumbersome. Noise from multiple light sources tends not to resolve as well as in Cycles and in Renderman and on top there is no on the fly denoising such as Renderman's and Eevees. One of my favourite features is the render passes - they are many and extremely simple to use and very useful for debugging and diagnostics. For example, Roughness filter or Raw diffuse filter is great for evaluating masks while searching for the right look or the right balance between mixed textures/materials.
Shading and rendering using Renderman feels like a privilege. The Pixar material library is a good start but in my experience, to take that to the next step requires a bit more technical knowledge compared to the other renderers I use. There are many advanced features which enable insane depth of control. For example, the dirt node, which is AO, in essence, can have a normal bias through which the AO distribution can be modulated.
