For the first assessment, I knew I wanted to do a lighting scenario based on Still Life paintings and photography. 

The first draft I made is shown below. By this point I was just throwing in objects that could look interesting and hadn't developed a theme or central idea for what the scene would be about. I used these three main objects to test metallic shaders, organic shaders and mesh lights.

My first idea was to do a candle-lit dinner scene, but that idea didn't work too well with the limited table space and some of the objects I had already made. Instead, I started to work on elements that would be seen on a study table during the middle ages. I created this simple book and bookmark, and textured it with an image of an old book found online. 

I placed the book into the scene behind the water pitcher, and added some loose pages which I created in photoshop.

I was originally going to either model a candlelight or create a fire volume simulation, but that would take too long so I decided to add an image of a flame in post.

I added a bite mark to the pear to create a bit more visual interest in the scene. I created a mix shader and combined the skin and flesh textures together with a mask. I tried to use a layered shader to get rid of the bump map on the pear flesh, but that didn't work for some reason. It wasn't visible unless close-up, so it didn't matter too much.

I didn't plan on adding a second book, but I thought it would be a nice addition at the end. To save time on UV unwrapping again I took the closed book and rotated the cover open, then duplicated the book cover and scaled it down to make the open pages. I used the loose page textures from earlier as the texture for the pages and did some tweaks to make it look like the book had hundreds of pages when viewed from the sides.

This was the first beauty pass directly from Arnold. I wasn't very happy with the metallic materials in the scene or the pitcher overall, the book looked wet and flat and the candle didn't look very waxy.

I added some details to the water pitcher's model and made the model less fat, as well as modifying the texture to look less shiny and perfect. I added a cup because having a pitcher without a cup made no sense contextually. I added a wax shader to the candle wax using one of Arnold's default shaders, and lowered the density of the fibres in the tablecloth. I exported this scene as 8 separate passes to Photoshop to fine-tune. 

Below is the final composited shot. I made the scene darker overall and brightened up the light emitting from the candle. I added a picture of a candlelight to finish the scene.

For this assessment, we were tasked with creating a realistic interior scene like those used in Arch-Vis. At first I did a bathroom like what was being used as an example in class. I wasn't very interested in this idea though so I looked for reference for other environments online.

I settled on this photograph here of a staircase in a modern suburban home. The design of the staircase and the shelving caught my eye, and so I based my interior design off of this.

I began with modelling the staircase and other important shapes in the scene, such as the base of the 2nd floor and the beginnings of the shelving.

This was the first render I did to test the paint and polished timber material. The first render was quite bland and lacked the distinctive colour for the floor that I was after. By this point I had also finished modelling the shelving in the staircase. The lighting overall was good though.

I added some more red and saturated the wooden elements in the scene, while also adding more background lighting to brighten up the scene some more. These lights looked really out of place though, so I moved them out of sight in later renders.

I started to model parts in the sides of the shot, including the window and door frames. I added a potted plant that I downloaded online on to the stairs to add some colour to the scene. I also added a picture from the famed show Married at First Sight as a surface shader to test how objects appeared through the glass material of the window. 

I received feedback that the door was a bit out of place in the scene and probably wouldn't be there in an actual house, which was a good point. I later added a door and an empty room to make it look like an extra room inside of the house.

To spice up the scene, I added different objects including a few photoframes on the back wall, a roomba, some plastic baskets, a fancy lamp and a hallway table. 

To finish the scene, I added a small plant and photo frame on the hallway table, as well as fencing that can be seen outside the window. I added several books of different colours into the shelving and a stone bird sculpture, as well as some hooks that could have been used for hats or coats.

Below is the final render for the scene. I believe it came out really well in terms of lighting and realism, although the items in the shelving stand out quite a bit. I didn't invest much time into those objects, so that is to be expected.

For this assessment, I wanted to create a cyberpunk or futuristic environment with bright neon lighting. However, I didn't want the environment to feel dystopian like many references I found online, so I used references of backstreets in modern cities such as Japan. I wanted to portray a very vibrant colour scheme of blue and pink as seen in the first reference image below.

The first part I worked on was the roads and pathways. I spent a lot of time trying to get the brickwork to look dynamic by translating and rotating groups of bricks. I added a layer of water in the bricks to make puddles. These bricks began to add up and when subdivided for rendering had 500000 polygons. This didn't lower render times significantly so I didn't prioritise fixing it. The sidewalks were done simply with a slab texture with a slight bevel near the brickwork. 

The buildings were modelled modularly, meaning that I could swap out floors individually to create diversity instead of having to model eight individual buildings. I didn't spend much time on texturing these buildings, thinking I would be able to do it after finalising the lighting, but that didn't end up happening.

The only floor that I modelled a different variation of was the ground floor, as the ground floor buildings couldn't be swapped with the upper floors. For this I modelled a garage door to make it look like the back of a business.

After adding the buildings to the scene, I started placing neon lights around the scene to create the bright lighting I wanted. The symbols for these neon lights were either modelled from online reference or with the use of the 3D Text tool. To make the scene less clean I added electrical wires between the buildings.

I also found a car online and added it to the scene as the overall scene was lacking focus in the background. 

This was the first proper render I did of the scene, when I had created two of the five neon lights. I also experimented with a displacement map texture for the brick work on the buildings, but this ended up slowing down the render scene and looked too rounded.

In the render below I swapped out the brick texture for a flat colour, which looked better I think. I then applied it to all the buildings in the scene.

This was one of the final renders I did, in which I added the car from earlier and the rest of the neon signs. I moved the motel sign into a less obstructed position to give a point of focus in the scene along with the car. 

This assessment ended up being incredibly rushed as I did not really fathom how much work I would need to put into a scene like this. I don't like doing environments in any artistic medium because I always get caught up in the details and making everything look of the same quality. The only thing I really liked in the render was the lighting and most of the modelling, I wish I had made time to work on the texturing and materials. This is way below what I consider to be my standard of work.