https://jmh3d.com/mocks/reading-nook.webp
I’ve decided to quit tweaking and submit this thing. The leaves were a lot of fun (not!). I see a few floaters, but I really don’t care anymore. As always, if you want to know about anything, just ask. Enjoy!
Nothing super special to explain, but here I go anyway: The Scene The only things that are mine are the leaves. Not too proud to say that 😆 Everything else was found/blendkit (I finally bought the full plan). I setup the scene, colors, lighting myself. Found a great image to mesh cutter to make the leaves. The link is below. It took 2 hours to render the 8K.. Not sure why. Maybe the thin wall/so much SSS is to blame?
Rendering/Color
Render Raw for dialing in the crispy look.
Light
I used the sun light at its intended strength of 1.0 (gasp!).
Shadows
No gobos here. The shadows are from two 50ft trees nearby. When you’re 10.5M faces in, what’s a few hundred thousand more, right??
Planter materials
Pretty neat. I gave Grok pictures of real Talavera dining plates and asked it to give me back the pattern as a seamless square image. It did an unbelievable job, even keeping the paint brush strokes of the plates. It was crazy, and now I know I can do that! Only 1024×1024, but that’s more than enough.
Leaves
MANY sim drops. It was a whole thing just like the chains for the hydrant. I always like to remind people that Bullet doesn’t like simming small objects, so I did the sim with the leaves scaled up 10X. I had to apply scale, do the sim, scale back down and apply scale. I used the new thin wall for the ivy and plant leaves, but I had to solidify the leaves for best sim results. They got a standard SSS material. Before dropping the leaves in the sim, i joined the different leaf types and ran a displace modifier to warp and wrinkle them. That worked wonderfully.
The Ivy
I found a few generators that were meh. I even paid for one and promptly asked for a refund like an hour later. He accommodated so that was nice. I almost lost my mind when I saw potential from a free one on blendkit. It was everything I needed and customizable. Link below.
Image-based mesh cutter
https://superhivemarket.com/products/image-to-cutout-mesh