Nick Wilson

Office

An abandoned administrative office in my former high school, shortly before it was torn down.

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The highlights of this scene:

• The textures - All the textures on the floor, ceiling and windows are purely procedural.
• The details - I find that the slightly blue tint in the door's window, the translucency in the ceiling light, and the slightly uneven floor really sell the scene.

The challenges of this scene:

• The floor - It was very difficult to find a high quality texture for the scratches and wear patterns on the floor, so I had to make them myself. I chose to do it procedurally, which took a day's worth of work. The end result is a monstrous node group that can lag the viewport if you look at it too closely.
• The outside world - Initially I was lighting the scene using a sun lamp and custom HDRI to get the colours and lighting to match the reference. However, it was incredibly difficult to get the windows to look right - any adjustments to the HDRI to try to fix the colours coming through the windows caused the scene lighting to change. I settled on a secondary, fake 'HDRI' outside the windows (a slightly emissive plane which I could texture paint the correct colours), which provided great results.
• Translucency - The slightly white tint in the windows is a nightmare for noise. All the scattering just destroys the scene - the final result rendered for over an hour and shows only marginal improvement over the previous render at half the samples.

What I learned:

• There are a few sites the offer paid options for surface imperfections, but outside of that there's very little of any usable quality online.
• Translucency is to be avoided if at all possible - in this case I was trying to recreate the original scene, but for scenes with less direction, I would not use it in the future.