Making-of: The kitchen project

Article written by Gabriele D’Angelo.

Hello, my name is Gabriele D’Angelo, I am a CG artist from Varese (Italy). In the last 20 years I was involved in many different projects and fields, from archviz to commercials, cooperating with many studio firms. Some works of mine were printed in international magazines like AD architectural digest. Actually I work as a freelancer and available for any cooperations. For first, I wish to thank Render Spirit who guests me on this cool community.

The kitchen project

References

Recently I was wondering at the differences between a warm photography and a nice, perfect rendering and I found that perfection of lens and finishings it’s the primary problem to solve to achieve a photo real look. Very often our clients ask us to show clearly the design, intentionally removing the emotional part of the communication target. Then… we find some blurred, grainly pictures and we ask to ourselves: How the client could accept this photo in his catalogue?
The answer is quite simple. We have the duty to suggest them our style , because very often they need to see before they appreciate our artistic approach. I was inspired by a catalogue from GRATTAROLA where they show this kind of pictures and I tried to remake this mood adding noise, camera distortions and aberrations with the goal to maintain a pleaseful sense for the result.

3D modeling

With this initial target in my mind, I decided to produce an interior view where the only light had to be the skylight and so I started to model the space according with these needs. A floor, a roof and some pillars to identify an open space.

And some plants (from Evermotion library) close to the exterior area to produce some soft shadows and blurred reflections.

The module of the kitchen is basic: a panel with a handle.

Then I will repeat and modify it to build all the front objects.

I have completed the kitchen with the hood and some elements.They are not visible in our final image but I didn’t decide at that moment if I would render more then one view or not.

The sink comes from my own library. I made it in a previous scene and just added some more details ’cause the same reason I already expressed before.

Some objects are from evermotion library (like the cookers and some fruits) and the others are quickly modeled in few minutes (like pot with a handle and dishes etc).

Materials

Nothing really special about the materials. Fresnel reflections and max samples fixed to 30 for some metals, average was 16. Anisotropy at 0,5 for the scratches of the cooker and some cans. No translucency for the leaves. These low sets help me to speed up the render process as you will see later.

After I assembled the scene I made few test render.

Scene settings

The light setup is really simple and very low quality because I didn’t need to clean so much the image and tried to keep some noise. So I’ ve added a V-RaySky in the environment and that’s all.

Some info:
2 Xeon 2,5 ghz / XP64 8gb RAM.
Render time: 0:13:16 at 1400pxls width.

Post production

1) Color/levels correction
2) Add the DOF effect using the zdepth element rendered in V-Ray
3) lens correction (chromatic aberration)
4) lens blur (for the noise)
5) fog (using reflector effect filter)

And get the final image:

I hope this making of will help you in some ways, and feel free to ask me anything more in the comments area below.

Best Regards.

Gabriele D’Angelo
info(at)setteminuti(dot)com

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