Assessing the design possibilities

When we're starting out in a scene. The first thing to do is assess the model, especially, if you didn't make it. And assess the design possibilities in the lighting. And also, see what the material palette is. What we're seeing here is a small office lobby or similar structure. It's got a wall of windows on the right side. Surface mounted cam lights under a bridge and an open riser stair leading up to the second floor. There's also a wall on the left side that's larger panels that are tiled with a smaller mosaic.

And finally there's a terrazzo floor laid in a diagonal pattern. At the end, we can see a reeded glass set of doors. And these all give us some neat ideas or possibilities in our design. Here's the things to look for then in thinking about how this will light and render on the interior. This wall on the left is a focal point. It's done in this tile in a very set pattern and there's a good chance that it'll sparkle and really pick up the light. The open web stair as well, is a nice detail. It's got a cable railing and is very slim and elegant on its single steel stringer.

Finally, there's the bridge, and we can see on the bridge it's actually done with a glass railing that's held in with visible screws. So we need to make sure those details really pop. The reeded glass doors at the end are another special case. The camera is aimed obviously at them. This is probably a boardroom or important office. And so we need to make sure those really have some luster. I'll go into a perspective view and look outside the design. We can see here that really this space exists just on its own. There's no rest of the building with it. We've got a big wall of windows and there's nothing outside.

So we need to make sure that we can, if we see out the windows, fade off nicely or put a color out there that will work. There's also sky lights, and these are round sky lights, roughly over the bridge and the stairs. So again, in the design this gives us an opportunity to have sun beams shoot through those sky lights, and land on the wall or the floor. We want to make sure that we take advantage of the possibilities in this lighting. The other doors in here are fairly straight forward solid doors. And they'll get a simple pain color as will most of the walls. I'll go and look at the material palette included in the source images as well.

What I've done here is to map on all the different textures in temporary and working materials. Using simple lambert shaders often with just a diffused color. Allowing me to place the texture in and get the UV's right. Well it shows correctly in the view, as in View 2.0 and doesn't see any other interference or lag from using a more sophisticated material. Here in the source images file then I can see I've got a variety of mosaic tiles. There's three different colors and they're denoted with a CS meaning color and shine. So there's something in the alpha channel we can use for the specularity.

There's a reeded glass and also our terrazzo. And that terrazzo actually has an alpha to it as well. It's quite a bit darker, but the alpha channel makes it look light here in the preview. Then there's a dark wood, and this is applied on the ceiling under the bridge, so we need to make sure its got a pretty good luster to it. Now that we've got a good idea of our design, we can really get in and start to light this scene. We'll begin by getting our materials on. And once we've got materials everywhere that react to light properly, we can start to get our daylight system. And our strong sun coming in through those windows.