Herman Miller ColourForm Sofa Group

Initial Moodboard

Creating the furniture

Herman Miller provides CAD models of most of their furniture on their website, and thankfully, the ColourForm Sofa Group was a part of this vast and thereby made the modeling process much easier for me. Models were brought into Sketchup to be exported as OBJs so they can be brought into Blender. The intent of remodeling based off these CAD models is for cleaner topology, which would, therefore, make UV Mapping a stroll in the park instead of an existential nightmare. 

Each piece of furniture was imported and duplicated for each of the three perspectives, and segregated into their respective collections, or layers, so I didn’t have to hide each individual model in the 3D space. Furniture with hard surfaces were made based on the perspective with much accuracy as possible. Furthermore, parts of furniture with a smooth curvature like the sofas and benches were essentially retopo’d in order to achieve said curvature using a Shrinkwrap modifier, which clung to the surface of a CAD model. Once the basic shape was established, I would apply the modifier and add additional loopholes to refine the overall shape.

Unfortunately, I could not replicate the fabric of the ColourForm furniture using cloth simulation in Marvelous Designer. So my next bet was to make the fabric through textures. I based my final material from a quilt preset by Faraz Shaikh. I made it plain white so I could simply add the color of my choice through Substance Painter.

Faraz Shaikh’s quilt material: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/w8w5aZ

Texturing Layers in Substance Painter

Final Models

Setting up in Unreal Engine

Once the ColourForm furniture models were textured, they were brought into the Unreal Engine for real-time and thus efficient rendering. It was difficult choosing a render engine for this project. Originally, I had considered Octane in 3Ds, but Unreal was more appealing to use as a whole.

Implementing Ray-Tracing

Image 01 (Global Illumination Enabled)

Image 02 (Global Illumination Disabled)

In order to activate ray-tracing in Unreal, if you will, you need three things to get started: an RTX GPU, and a Post-Process Volume, and enable DirectX 12 in the Project Settings. In the PostProcess settings under “Rendering Features” is where you can find the magic. Check off boxes such as Ray Tracing Global Illumination to bring forth true realism. Not all settings have to be enabled to achieve your desired results, however. For instance, Screen Space Reflections can stay as is, or be changed to Ray Tracing.

The "Red" Room

This room had begun out to be my cover pages; however, over time the room had gotten very busy, so to speak, with all the stuff in it. The "Overture" room would become the cover pages and a two-page spread. The red on the walls would be toned down, for it was quite strong compared to everything else; since the focus of these shots are the ColourForm furniture.

"Overture"

Final back and front cover renders respectively

WIP Shots

Office Space 01

The intent of creating an office space in this project was not only for scene diversity but also to follow suit with how Herman Miller markets their furniture: both in living and office spaces while making it feel lively and used often. The Meridian Storage Set of Herman Miller was made to efficiently create a modular shelving set for an office space such as this. 

Mid-Century Modern Abode

For the final scene of this project, my good friend, Alana Fletcher, collaborated with me to create a mid-century modern scene. She was responsible for creating this moodboard and a color palette for the scene.

Organic Models were obtained from Sketchfab. Here are a couple of collections that have the models used in this scene: 

https://sketchfab.com/ithesus/collections/dagd-vis-dev

https://sketchfab.com/ithesus/collections/dagd-mid-century

Color Palettes by Alana Fletcher. After a week of consideration, we decided to move forward with the first palette.

Preliminary Camera Angles

Print Book Layout.

Print Book Final Draft

The print book, both draft and final, were printed through blurb.com, and they turned out great overall!

Link to previewable book via web: https://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/8642284/a91ac0c8cedddad88cd10453135d45757e7e0cee

Print Book Rough Draft 

Preliminary Sketches

"Color" & Room Sweeps

Music used: "Come Alive" by danosong.org

Using the Sequence Editor, I was able to animate cameras spawned in the world and create keyframe animations.

Pre-Ray-Tracing Render

Static Image Renders for Print