Victorian Sea Bathroom

This piece is a Victorian era bathroom with a sea / ocean theme. I wanted the bathroom to have an unhurried and inviting feel. I had a lot of fun making this. I looked up tons of reference images and flipped through many digitized pages of period catalogs in an attempt to achieve the right feel and time period.

I modeled everything in Maya and textured using (at the time still) Substance Painter and Substance Designer. These images were rendered using Arnold.

The fish swimming up the columns was inspired by a school of fish that I saw in a documentary video while I was making this project. The way the fish moved together in that open water is so interesting and graceful. I wanted to bring that line and curve into the piece. I love that you can find inspiration in all kinds of different places in life.

The seahorse leg was one of the trickiest things for me to model in this bathroom, but I enjoyed the challenge of solving this modeling puzzle. I saw a Seahorse leg aquarium in a Victorian catalog and the idea was too perfect for this space. I tried different things until I figured out how to get the ridges and all of the curves the way I needed -- all while keeping nice edge flow. I wanted it to be able to catch light and shadow in a certain way. 

I would like to make more improvements to the scene and its realism in the future... but right now, I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I enjoyed this bathroom project in general.

Credits: 

HDRI Image (contributing to some of the lighting) is from www.HDRIHaven.com

The images of the paintings on the wall are from Smithsonian Open Access: 
Studies of Feet, and a Fluted Shell (ca. 1895), by Francis Augustus Lathrop
The Sea (ca. 1870), by Edward Moran
I was excited that I was able to find images (below) that were both on-theme and actually painted or drawn during the Victorian era (and that were cc0 use). 

Here are some of my reference images (in case you were curious):

Thanks for viewing my entry! Have a nice rest of your day.