I completed an interior design of a 2-story house which is as much functional and convenient, as aesthetically pleasing and also represents optimization of space. I created floor plans of an entire house in AutoCAD 2017, made sketches of different rooms in SketchUp Pro 2018, and modeled the final product of an interior space of the kitchen/dining/living area in 3Ds Max 2018.
The project took an entire semester. Not only I learned how to use these multiple softwares, but also learned a lot about interior design concepts in general. The project is described step-by-step in my previous blog posts.
The RAM sequence created and saved through 3Ds Max actually was not of the best quality so I uploaded an image sequence in Premier Pro and added the title text. The final rendered animation is presented in YouTube and takes 28 seconds. Please make sure you set up a max video quality of 720p. Otherwise, by default YouTube makes it a very poor quality animation.
These are the still lives (photo realistic renderings) of my final scene which present different lighting (also rendered at different quality and using different render engines).
Daylight. Autodesk Raytracer. 3000 x 2000 px
2. Night time. Autodesk Raytracer. Some lights are on. 1280 × 720 px
3. Night time. Autodesk Raytracer. All lights are on. 3000 x 2000 px
4. Draft quality night time image. Quicksilver Hardware Renderer. 256 iterations. 1920 × 1080 px
To render an animation I saved out to an image sequence. I was still using ART renderer. Everything was done through Render Setup Menu. The main things that needed my attention are encircled in red in the following screenshot.
I created 250 individual JPEG files,one for each frame – from …/walkthrough_0001.jpeg through …/walkthrough_0250.jpeg.
Since I set the time for each frame = 10 min (and ~25dB quality), I could render 6 frames per hour. So the entire process took over 40 hours. I was praying my computer wouldn’t die.
Then, I played an image sequence using RAM player where I loaded those 250 frames which allowed me to play them back in real time.
I’ve already mentioned before that 3ds Max gives us the abilityto illuminate the scene with day lighting. I’ve created Sun and Sky Positioner and set up location, date, and time.
Exposure Controls for my perfectly clear sunny day are:
These are 3000 × 2000 px images rendered in ART renderer at 25-26 dB quality.
These are the photo realistic 3000×2000 px rendered images of my scene produced in ART renderer at about 25-32 dB quality. The daylight is off and all scene lights are off which creates night time scene.
The Kitchen.
Resolution: 3000×2000 (render time was about 11 hours)
Living/Dining Area/View from the Kitchen Island
Partial Top View
TV Wall Unit with all backlights on
A little bit about the process…
I was glad to see that 3Ds Max provides an estimated render time which Maya does not do for some reason.
Another cool thing about ART renderer (my experience in Maya with Mental Ray did not have this option) is that I can set the quality to a higher value, and still manually stop the rendering at any given time, once I feel I have reached a reasonable quality output. The reason why I think it’s important to do so is because our eye does not percept the difference between 32dB and 100dB quality rendered image (at least not in frames of this project since I don’t have that many highly reflective surfaces, a lot of multi-layer materials, and other super complicated stuff).
Here is the Estimated Render Time of 3000×2000 image at 100dB which is the Max Render Quality – 835 hours 30 min!!!!! (Which is almost 35 days in a row!) OMG! What else can I say.
I rendered this scene for about 11 hours and noticed that the quality of an image has not been really changing after about 5-7 hours (when the quality is reached at about 28-30dB).
Therefore, it’s important to set an automatic stop based on a time frame or a number of calculated iterations if and when the target quality is not attained. Or just stop it manually whenever you feel like it.
There was another quality setting based on the Rendering method: Fast Path Tracing and Advanced Path Tracing. I guess Advanced Path Tracing does a better job but it certainly takes longer render times. For my project, there is no need in Advanced Path Tracing so I go with the default Fast Path Tracing method.
Also, ART Renderer includes a Noise Filtering option to minimize grain. But I was taught by the numerous internet tutorials that I should not set it high otherwise I may lose the important details in the scene because the program may recognize it as noise as well. So I stuck with 20% noise filtering.
This diagram shows that in the interior design process, “Space planning comes first”. No matter how many cool ideas and inspirational pictures you have in mind, you have to plan it.
As I mentioned in my previous presentation, project begins with an assessment of a room’s functional deficiencies and how the elements can be manipulated to better fit the people who live there.
“What do you need in your space and how do you move through your life everyday?”
Only after a lot of planning you can start doing sketches. For me, the best sketching tool was SketchUP. After many sketches have been done I went ahead to work on a final product using 3Ds Max.
From SketchUP to 3Ds Max
SketchUp is a great tool for visualizing the project. Instead of drawing on paper (even though I did sketch on paper a lot) you draw in this easy-to-learn software. It’s cost effective and easy to understand. However, You cannot professional 3D renderings in SketchUP.
3Ds Max is a professional software widely used in present architecture market. All interior designers nowadays should have some 3Ds Max skills under their belts.
3Ds Max vs Maya
For the most part, Maya has been known to be a much more powerful application when it comes to animation, with a huge library of animation tools, and for the most part the exact same animation could be accomplished in either application, but when it comes to ease of use, and the amount of tools available, Maya is the stronger of the two.
3ds Max has a very robust modeling toolset with a huge library of different modifiers which can make the modeling process easier. Depending on how new you are to the world of 3D then modeling in 3ds Max can be a little easier to grasp. If you’re familiar with the Booleon operation, 3ds Max is also known to work much easier and smoothly than in Maya. If you’re going to get into the architectural visualization like interiors and buildings, 3ds Max is your choice.
Screenshot slides:
Creating floor plans (made by extruding the walls and then cutting holes for doors and windows using Boolean compound object)
Two types of modeling:
Polygon (chair): I created a cylinder and shaped it using different tools
NURBs (stairs): I made a spline (or a curve), then extruded it along a certain axes and then duplicated each step using an “array” tool
Combining into a major scene:
Two types of referencing objects:
XRef object referencing (briefly, it’s a type of referencing when you don’t copy the object but reference it from the other file. Good thing – no additional memory is used. BUT it didn’t work for me because my computer kept crushing so I used the second method)
Merging scenes (object becomes a part of the scene we’re currently in)
P.S. Just like in Maya, learning how to use Scene Explorer, in other words hierarchies and groups in 3Ds Max is also very important.
Lights
– The purpose of photometric lighting is to expect that the rendering that you receive will look more or less like it would in the real world. Photometric lighting actually gives us a lot more power and control and we’ll end up with more believable renderings.
– Creating sun and sky. Not only it gives the option of creating a perfectly clear sunny day outside which creates a natural day lighting. But it only has an option of setting up the location on Earth. For example, we can set up that the scene is located in Philadelphia, its April 3rd, and its about 10am. And when I change these values, like if I go to a different month,that’s going to change where the sun is.So in January at 10 a.m., the sun is gonna be in different spot .But you can bring this back to April, and the sun’s gonna be a different location.
– ART renderer – Autodesk Ray Tracer is a physically based renderer which is already installed in 3Ds Max. Rule with ART renderer: you can’t do anything that doesn’t exist in the real world. It has to have volume to lights. For example, in order to have some soft shadows, light has to have some physical volume (sphere) and size (radius).
Intensity: 1000.0 cd
Color: Kelvin 3600.0
Shape/Area Shadows – Sphere (makes soft shadows and distributes light equally comparing for ex with point light) with Radius of 2’0.0”
modeling stairs (and duplicating them with array tool)
wireframed view
The purpose of photometric lighting is to expect that the rendering that you receive will look more or less like it would in the real world. Photometric lighting is the first type of lighting I’m learning, and according to lynda.com tutorials it actually gives us a lot more power and controland we’ll end up with more believable renderings.
These are my first attempts of embedding photometric lights (standard spherical free light) into the lamps I have above the kitchen island and rendering using the default 3Ds Max Scanline renderer.
The living room is perhaps one of the most important rooms in our homes. A lot of modern houses nowadays follow the idea of making a living room combined with the kitchen and dining area.
Firstly, the undeniable advantage of kitchen combined with a living room is space for the expansion of the usual meeting of households at the dinner table. Second, a living room gets much more daylight thanks to the kitchen windows. Third, while cooking at the kitchen, a mom, for example, is always free to communicate with other family members who are constantly in the field of view. Fourth, it is much easier to host large parties or family gatherings. And last but not least, in combination with the successful design the unity of kitchen and living room would substantially transform the interior, fill apartment with comfort, and contribute to its functionality.
Below is the slideshow of screenshots of the living room combined with the dining area model made in SketchUp. (Please note the walls and furniture are white which means that color or texture is undefined as of now).
After combining the kitchen I made before with this model of the living room space, we get the final sketch. Below is the gallery of the final combo screenshots.
When it comes to home decor and bedroom styling I think it’s the best if the room presents clean, fresh atmosphere and provide a good air flow. My personal experience tells me that the bedroom is the most intimate and relaxing spot in the house. It is extremely important that my bedroom space corresponds to my mood. The master bedroom interior should be rather the place where people can blank their minds and forget about their daily routine. Whether a person shares his/her bed with the partner or does not, there should not be any mental activities as people go to the bed. Relaxation, pleasure, and refreshing are the things coming in my mind when I think about going to the bed. And therefore, a suitable bedroom interior should help us to shut the brain down and turn our unconscious self on. That’s when dreams come to the play.
We spend our days gathering information, some of it we would like to keep, most of it we need to discard. If we do not clear out our mental storage space regularly we risk saturating our brain with too much useless trivia. In order to fully process this information, we need to shut our brain down; disconnect it entirely from the outside world.
While scientists still do not know much about why or how we dream, an interior designer’s concern is to make sure that people spend a third of their lives sleeping being in a comfortable pleasing atmosphere. And the color choice is the first thing an interior designer should think of while making the master bedroom interior for dreaming and not for sleeping.
For me, the choice is obvious. A white on white room is timeless. And it’s not just a personal preference. White color is both blank and rich, it fills mind and space at the same time. It symbolizes purity, goodness, heaven, light, innocence and spirituality. It is a perfect color for relaxing, emptying the mind and diving right into the dream world. Pizzetti Design says
White interiors can bring you peace, tranquility, relax, but also, with the right pop of colors and contrast, they easily become versatile, alive, energetic. Not to mention that they make the room look bigger, spacious and airy.
Even though white itself is a pretty complete color, I agree that adding some spots of bright color can’t hurt. Especially if combined with simplified geometric shapes and lines, it makes an amazing effect of spaciousness in the bedroom.
Solution
Elegancy of my master bedroom contemporary interior design is in color choice (white with some accents of rich deep purple), simple shapes, functionality and spaciousness. All together it is a design in minimalist geometric style. Furniture, including the bed, shelves, and desk, are designed to create interesting negative open spaces. There is no nightstands next to the bed since it stands on the horizontal shelf units which function as both nightstands and bed pedestal. The master bedroom has a walk-in-closet and master bathroom (not yet completed).
I used SketchUp Pro 2018 to complete the sketch of my idea, as well as a lot of pencil/charcoal on paper.
REFERENCES
Wenk, Gary L. “Sleep and Dreams.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 7 Feb. 2011, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-food/201102/sleep-and-dreams.
Posted on March 26, 2014 at 7:20 am. Written by Pizzetti Design. “Dreaming in White: 10 Stunning White Interiors.” PIZZETTI DESIGN, 8 July 2014, www.pizzettidesign.com/dreaming-in-white-10-stunning-white-interiors/
Scott, Elaine, and John O’Brien. i.pinimg.com/originals/1b/bb/2f/1bbb2ffdb2552f729e9b13b1785e91f7.jpg.
Interior design is a very broad field which embraces a great deal about art, culture, social tastes, lifestyle choices, and more. It involves everything from the planning and organization of space and lighting to the selection of materials, textures, furniture and accessories. In most cases, modern interior design modeling is based on both 2D (image) and 3D (space) modeling in frames of a very limited real estate. Functional approach based on economy and convenience became key points. Thus, the first step for an artist (interior designer) is to create a successful 3D interior model which will be as much functional and convenient, as aesthetically pleasing.
Since I consider interior design as one of the possible future career paths I wanted to connect this project with designing an interior. My Possible World focuses on the creation of a small immersive environment such as an interior design of my living room. I decided to start with not so much of designing but copying an existing room in my house. Of course, the environment is simplified and many objects have similar but not the same structure (such as piano, spiral staircase).
Here is the picture of my living room vs. the rendered Maya image.
DCIM102GOPROG1935647.
In Maya, I modeled the environment and its materials, textures, lighting and movement of a camera through space. First part of the project was to create an environment. The material and textures include laminate, wood (piano, coffee table, stairs, plant), carpet, leather and others. Doors and windows with blinds are png images inserted into the walls. I learned how to use bump mapping to create a realistic textures of leather and carpet.
Bump mapping of leather texture(alpha gain = 0.1, picture with inverted in Photohop colors)
Bump mapping of carpet texture (alpha gain = 0.8)
Second part was to create a simple rigged entity. In my case, it is a butterfly. Even though I learned how to use Blend Shapes, I used Expression Editor (Windows->Animation Editors->Expression Editor) for rigging the wings.
Left wing (I played around with each wing separately).
Note: These functions are made only after creating additional attributes in the Channel Box (Edit -> Add Attribute) , such as in my case Wiggle, WingSpan, and CycleTime.
math function = sin
Right wing
The first couple of seconds of the animation shows randomized motion of the butterfly which is also done using Expression Editor.
random function = noise
For the light, I used one light source – point light with intensity 1000 and retrace shadows.
After organizing lighting and movement of a camera through space, I created a small animation of two butterflies flying in my living room.
Unfortunately, I could not batch render an entire animation. After rendering first 50 frames, which took about 2.5 hours, I calculated that I would need 50 hours to render my 1000 frame movie. To demonstrate some of the textures, I rendered a few separate frames.
At the frame 1, we can see closely the butterfly wings and piano keys with their reflected shadows.
At the frame 322, we can see the spiral staircase materials and textures (and the realistic shadow on the wall):
At the frame 460, we can see the carpet and coffee table textures:
In order to see the carpet little better, I removed the coffee table:
At the frame 562, we can see textures of the plant (leaves, pot, crust, dirt) and the nice shadow on the wall:
At the frame 835, we can closely see the leather texture:
I also rendered a few other random perspective views to have a better understanding of the room layout and some other textures.
