Produce a warm atmosphere
Give your interiors a warm tone with the effective use of lighting, colour and composition
Amir Mohammad Nabavi shows how to create a warm interior
In this tutorial, we will take a look at how to create a simple realistic scene. To start off, we need a great architectural design, then some high-quality assets and textures for making our design more realistic. After that, we will use a combination of lighting, colour harmony and composition to create our desired final look.
01 MODEL THE ROOM AND INTERIOR
As you can see, this project only requires some simple modelling; you just need to know about dimensions in architecture to model this room. After creating the room it’s time to arrange the furniture. Some assets were purchased from 3dsky and Evermotion and the rest modelled by me. Next we’ll place our models in the scene. I wanted to depict the inside as warm and the outside cold, so I used a fireplace in the room and for outside I made the weather rainy.
02 FABRIC
For the fabric I used Marvelous Designer. First, I exported my collision object with OBJ format, then in the 2D scene
I created a 100*50cm rectangle for my fabric and in the 3D scene, I moved it. For controlling your fabric, click the simulation button. For better simulating you can decrease particle distance. For exporting, consider the scale of the object. After importing to 3ds Max, you should optimise your fabric by using Prooptimizer.
03 HAIR AND FUR
For hair, I used the Hair and Fur modifier. In the Dynamics parameters, you can simulate that in Live mode. Just click on Live and you’ll see the hair start moving based on the Dynamics parameters. When you’ve got your desired result, just press Esc and then click freeze. After that, I used Styling for further tweaks.
In General Parameters, there are many useful options; you can see my settings in the image below. Remember to set the Hair and Fur rendering option to ‘mr prim’ in the Environment and Effects window.
04 LIGHTING (EXTERIOR)
The first thing to do is use 'Mtl. override' in the render settings, but preserve the Light, Portal and Glass.
I wanted to create a sunset atmosphere so I used a nice HDRI for the environment map; remember you can use the Corona Color Correct map to change gamma and exposure of your HDRI. After my initial test render
I wanted to have more blue light in the room, so I did two tweaks: adding a portal object and a rectangular Corona light behind the window with 35,000 Kelvin! For the exterior background I used Corona Light Mtl.
05 LIGHTING (INTERIOR)
The important point here is to mix cold and warm light; if you check pro renders you can see this contrast a lot. For interior lighting, I used some halogen light (IES) and a rectangle light for above the bed. One of the best features of Corona is light mixing; you can activate it from the render settings, so now you can change the light settings after rendering!
06 SHADING
If you want to create realistic materials you need a PBR workflow. Using PBR materials means using textures with maps for most of the channels, like reflection, normal map etc. So for concrete I used PBR textures, and you can see the material settings in the screenshot.
For creating a rainy window there are different methods: you can use pre-made raindrop textures, but here I used Substance Painter which gave me a good result. First, you should unwrap your object for importing to Substance Painter.
07 WINDOW SHADING
After unwrapping the window, you need to export it. In Substance Painter, I changed the shader settings for creating glass material. Then I baked my model
– it gives you useful map channels. Next create a fill layer for basic glass material, activate ‘op’ and deactivate the ‘nrm’ option. Now I want to add raindrops, and for that I used MATFX Water Drops. For exporting textures with opacity channels consider adding Opacity in the Texture Set Settings.
08 POST-PRODUCTION
Corona Renderer has a powerful frame buffer and helps us use Photoshop less. I set Contrast to 3 and Temperature to 7,000 and used bloom, glare and sharpening. I also used LUT which helped to make my design really beautiful. •