After the success of my first original render, I decided to move on to something more grand. During a recent talk with a couple about darkrooms (The video for which I am currently editing), they mentioned a fetish event they attended some years ago that was held in an abandoned cigarette factory. The darkroom, which was more of a dark space, was essentially and empty hall with the factory where they had placed a couple of gelled work lights. This was a large open space where people were able to simply do what ever they wanted. I immediately knew I wanted to reconstruct this space, so I began research cigarette factory's.
I wanted to capture the open space, and the industrial materials, which are often to be found in permanent darkrooms as well. One image in particular (the top right here) pulled me in with its architecture, and I decided to construct this space as if it had been cleared out ready to be used for a dark room.
The above images show the layout and modelling of the space. My experiences from the previous renders made getting the proportions easier, however the windows at the back of the space ended up taking a couple of days to get right as the models for these were so complicated. Again, this is a bit of a planning issue, I really should have spent that time working on them as in the final render they are barely even visible. The detail work on the joists and architrave however were definitely worth the time working on, as they helped to give the space the look of an almost Victorian factory, which is what drew me into the reference picture. Below is an example of a test I did mixing several PBR textures together in or to create a more realistic decayed looking plaster and brick texture which I would then use for the walls in the final render. This technique allowed me to paint on the plaster and decayed paint by hand, giving the walls of the final render a very random, and so realistic, feel of decay, and reducing the chances of any repeating patterns that often recur when texturing a large 3D space. For this too work, I had to learn a new piece of software called "Mask Tools" that worked inside blender and allows you to combine multiple PBR textures.
Above is my penultimate render of this scene. I felt, after post-processing, that the lighting was far too saturated, and the air almost felt too clean. So in the final render (Below) I added more fog to the scene within Blender, and then accentuated this with smoke textures in Photoshop. I also colour corrected, and again reduced the depth of field and added grain to simulate how a real life camera would react in such a dark space.
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