Smeg toaster - a call from the past

Hi everyone! Finally i'm happy to show you what i've worked on the last two months for SkyUp Academy. This time we had to model and render a scene from a photo trying to creating it realistic as possibile. I'm gladly showing you the process that got me here.

1. Getting all the material to start

Since i needed a better idea of the shape, materials, and details of what i was going to do, i started by doing a well, in-depth, reference reaserch and study.

2. Modeling

The references were ready, modeling started. The complicate part: understanding the shape. Since we had to align the camera to the scene i couldn't really understand if i was getting the shape correctly. After some work i thought i was in the correct focal length and started composing the scene. When i did my blocking i immediatly started adding some materials just to see better if the shape corrisponded. Here you can see how the blocking advanced and the final result with the topology.

All the assets you see in the scene were done individually and imported back in the scene.

3. UV's and Texturing

All the modeling was done, i took a big breath and started diving with the unwrapping of my uv's. I encountered some difficulties since it was the first time. I had some easy shapes, like for example on the background. But since my experience with it is new i had some difficulties with unwrapping my hero assets. But i was pretty happy with my final risult and you can see it with this render.

After that i immediately jumped into Adobe Substance Painter and started doing some textures. At first i couldn't really understand how to make my project more realistic, more good looking, but after some work i started getting the hand with the software and happened to do something i liked! 

Here you can see how it looked before the texturing with just some simple shading, my first try after texturing, and than the final result. I did a lot of work with the table with the help of photoshop creating a texture from scratch.

4. Lighting and rendering

Here starts the final part of my work, and maybe even the most difficult one.

Lighting was very complicated, after i found my dome light i started adding the key ones. But oh my, it was not as easy as i thought it would be. At first my guess was to just add the lights i could see, so one in the back from a window and one on the right. But it didn't work...

After some thought process, i started adding the wall and the ceiling and painting them with a material that i needed, than, corrected the lights and adjusted the values. 

It was really hard but in the end the final result got me satisfied, the lights let us see all the tiny details of the scene and work well, but still it wasn't balanced as i wanted.

5. Post Processing

Since i felt like something still wasn't there after the lighting, i jumped into photoshop and did some color correction and work on the shadows. The initial render was a bit flat in my opinion, shadows were not that strong and some colors were off. So i firstly added some glare to get a better and more realistic feeling, and than i corrected the shadows and gave more contrast to the photo.

Now i was happy with the final result.

I hope you like the project and the process behind it!