In project 3, we are supposed to find a reference photo and make a scene with some movement, whether it's created by the camera move, light move, or anything within it. Since it's all about the light, I decide to focus on photos which have windows in them.

After spent sometime surfing online, I found two great photos from Getty image. One has some wooden wares in it, with the light cutting by an invisible blind. Another one shows a simple room with light coming inside. Both of the photos have very dramatic light change, and a very subtle/ or none color on them, which are really charming to me. Because I rarely do lighting with color, I decided to go with the orange one at the very beginning.

However, what looks simple are many times, not simple at all.

After spending a whole afternoon trying to get the main light work but fail, I found out it is VERY VERY HARD to have the whole setting work, because there is simply too few information in this photo.

You can hardly defined if the ground plane is plane or not, and how to set the blinder and window is also another problem. Is the blinder twisted? Or if the "wall" is not plane? Or both of them could be curvy? Also, what is their relationship to the environment?

Eventually, I chose the black and white photo to be the reference photo, because it provides me enough information to work with. I made the space a laundry room, for its color tone somehow made me think of laundry room.

Anyway, just as professor Gaynor mentioned, something looks simple is always HARD! It is true!!!!

The two photos here are the reference I chose.
All right belongs to the artists and Getty Image.

Since my reference did not have a complicate setting, it only took me several hours to finish the modeling and texturing. Then it came to the time working with lights.

What I learned from class is lights, generally speaking, can be defined into three different categories. One is the main light, which literally is the strongest light in the whole scene. Another light source is the sky light, which is not truly a light omitting source, but reflecting the light of main light, it is usually 70% of the main light. The third one is the bounce light from ground plane.

In my scene, I have one main light as the sun and a sky light for the outdoor area . Inside the room, I set 5 lights in order to give enough light to light the room.

When working on lighting, to have the main light done, and gradually move to other weaker lights.

What troubles me more is the blind will actually cut more light than I thought. In order to get a result close to the photo, I eventually use several spot light with small cone angle to make the white wall have a very bright quality. Usually this can be done with one spot light with very big corn angle, but here I want to have more control over them in order to create the very fine light gradation, so I chose to use several small sopt lights.

I found the scene photo from internet, because it matches the season I want, and also has very limited color, I decide to use it for the outside scene of the window.

After I first finished this project, there comes out a problem which I really couldn't figure out, that is: How can the blinds being so bright?

If you look carefully, you will find that the blind in original photo appears to be very bright. In fact, although there is no light lighting them from inside, they still look white. Shadow seems to be invisible in them. I've noticed this but not sure how to do about it, because they look very concrete, not thin enough to let so much light passing through. I tried to add a light to make them brighter, but the result is not even close to the photo's quality.

After my present, professor Gaynor said that blind is made of glass, which is a very old style. She happened to have seen it, thus it is not hard for her to figure out why they can be so bright. That's truly a surprise to me, because I had never thought about they can be glass!

Sometimes it's very important for 3D artists to know more about everything, these things might seem to be useless trivia, but who knows? If I don't know what's the actual material, I could never figure out how to make them as bright as the photo shown!

Top: before material corrected.
Down: final corrected result.