My first 8 months with ArchViz

My first 8 Months making ArchViz!

Yellow Living-room

My very second good ArchViz project. Took just over a week to complete. This taught me that it's okay not to model everything yourself, and how to play with the lighting to make it play an interesting part in your scene. This was also my first encounter using surface imperfection maps, and imperfections in the model such as shown on the carpet. All in all I'm still very pleased with how it turned out, and to this date it's one of my favorite ArchViz renders I've made.

Green Kitchen

This took just under a week to complete. My goal for this were to make a Scandinavian looking scene, with a lot of Danish elements. This also served as a lesson for me, always to include smaller elements to the scene that would help tell a story, as can be seen on the image below, there are Danish Olive oil, Danish newspaper & Danfoss radiator. Here for an example, I'm envisioning an early morning just before going to work. Having coffee at the table and reading the newspaper... This is an early bird living here.

Lightblue Loft Bedroom

This however was certainly not a project I'm proud of. To this day i still say it's an absolute failure. Whilst I learned a great deal from working with this scene, in the end, I didn't get a satisfying result. It was however my first time working with Megascans Assets, and it made me more comfortable using them for projects henceforth. This took me just over 2 weeks to finish if memory serves me right. As can be seen on the process below, I went through quite a bit of change aswell, but in the end it still wasn't to my liking, and so it's not on my artstation anymore.

Pink Dining-room

And now: another project I dislike the end result of. But I am including these that i do not like because mistakes are part of the journey, and I learned something from each of them, valuable or not.

The project was meant to make me try something much simpler so i could focus on the compositioning and the lightning and the materials. As you can see on the process below, I went through a bit alteration once again. I did however learn a valuable lesson; Don't use Corona Light-Portals unless they can be aligned up 1:1 with the window openings. Else they're gonna cause awful artefacts.

The project took just about 2 weeks from start to finish, but alas I didn't like the end result, and so this has also been removed from my Artstation page.

Some Information:

As can be seen I include some images that I dislike as well, because part of the journey is the mistakes made along the way. Now for the most part I have just downloaded models for my projects. However, lately I've begun to model one hero-object per principle, for each of my projects. This has helped me in keeping my modelling skills up to my own standards, and has made it easier for me to modify models I'd download.

Now, I haven't included my 3 first ArchViz Projects, because those were all doodles and didn't actually teach me anything from the process of finishing them. When I originally made those 3, I had no intention of actually wanting to do this as a job, and had my eyes pretty much set on becoming a Environment-Artist. But after really giving ArchViz a proper go, I discovered how much fun it was. What I enjoy the most about making ArchViz Projects now is to make the materials from scratch (More or less), adding smaller details (either in textures or geometry) & telling a story with my renders, making it realistic in the process. 

Red & Green Kitchen

For once I wanted to go crazy with the colors, and so I decided on this 70's Kitchen, which I then "renovated". As per my principle i modeled the cabinets on the right myself, the table, the table-bench & the stovetop-oven. This was a crazy fun project to work on, and I learned quite a lot with it. The surface imperfection bitmaps are really what makes this project come together though, and I definitely owe thanks to Poliigon for that. Which I later discovered I were actually featured on (Poliigon's monthly blog of best renders). This was generally just a really fun project to be working on. Being able to go bananas with the colors was such a treat.

White Bathroom

A friend of mine that I admire greatly for his contributions to the ArchViz community with his Discord server, is Mads Lind Nicolaisen. And so I wanted to try and make a really white interior for once. And I have always struggled with bathrooms, so that's what I decided to go for. This is the first time I've done a bathroom i can really be proud of. And as always i tried to add some elements from my country, although I'm sure they didn't actually originate in Denmark. But the ceiling is a transparent wavy plastic roof, one often seen on half-roofs (correct term?), and I then used textures and alphas on a copy of the low points of the roof to add leafs into it, as to simulate that the roof had not been cleaned in a while, and debris such as leaves had gathered over time in the lower points of the wavy roof.

BW Bathroom

Heres a project I actually got quite a bit ahead with before it was ultimately scrapped. Or rather, I finished it, but decided not to make it public because in the end, I quite disliked it and frankly thought it not to be of my current standards.

This too went through a bit of change, but by now you must know that such is it with most my projects.

White Kitchen

Here's my latest finished project and by far my most beloved project so far. It's based off an apartment i found online, (most my renders are based off of real life photographs) and this is just one of the room of the apartment. I do hope I can have another room from this apartment ready before the submissions end, because boi am I in love with this apartment. Lofts are such a treat, and I honestly think going forward those will be my absolute go-to for personal projects.

There's not much in this project i dislike to be honest, only some minor details such as textures not showing up correctly in the final render, but that's the way of test rendering at a lower resolution than the final render resolution... This render is definitely a personal win for me though, because it was based off the same image as the Lightblue Loft Bedroom, only this one stays truer to the path due to me finally being good enough with perspective matching to be able to get it as close to the original as I personally want it to be.

There are many details in this project, and it's not heavily reliant on Surface imperfections but makes use of them where necessary. The chairs are almost nostalgic to me, because the designer of those chairs also made stools, which are seen in almost every kindergarten in Denmark. The carpet too is very Danish to me as it's sort of a lot of scraps of cloth knitted together to one carpet. Not something I've seen in other countries either. This project has a lot of smaller details you won't notice unless you really zoom in. All in all I absolutely love this render to bits!

Finally I just wanna say thank you for helping me come this far, to everyone helping me on this journey. I'm sure theres plenty more to learn. Especially thank you to the very helpful people over at the ArchViz Discord Server, without them I would've never gotten as far as I have, in the amount of time since I first decided to "git gud". 

Currently I'm an intern at a Danish company in Århus where I also live, and have been at the company for 2 weeks. Hopefully that's gonna turn into an apprenticeship soon so I can finish my education. However, on the off-chance that someone that sees this thinks my projects are great enough to want to hire me as an apprentice (the same as paid intern more or less), I'm still considering my options, so don't hesitate to shoot me a message or email.

I can't wait to keep on learning more, and I hope you enjoyed this journey process of mine.
In the meantime though, I'm just going to keep on thinking the pink elephant into the box.

Thanks!
-Immanuel I. M. Klostergaard