Create an office space in Blender - Tip of the Week

Blender is one of the most interesting apps in 3d world - it has been developing very quickly and incorporated many innovative solutions lat years. With Blender 2.80 we got real-time renderer in viewport - Eevee and many other improvements when it comes to GUI and usability. In Blender 2.81 we can use Intel Denoiser and Nvidia Optix for increasing rendering speed with RTX cars.

It isn't surprising that more and more people start to use it for creating 3d graphics, including arch-viz. Maybe Blender is not right now in the place where it could replace other, well established 3d software like 3ds Max or C4D (we need more interesting scattering tools like Blender Scatter and better viewport performance and some Cycles improvements), but it is advancing pretty fast. There is no reason why you could not create nice looking interior.

Today we are looking at the project of an office created primarily for 3ds Max and V-Ray and then easily ported to Blender and Cycles. 

This scene comes from Archinteriors vol. 33 for Blender. It's 9th scene in this collection.

This is a final office scene made in Blender and rendered in Cycles.

A small walktrough clip (no commentary).

Wireframe view. As you can see, the floor is just a plane with texture. There are also many light sources visible, despite the fact that it is daily scene.

Viewport view.

Chair mesh (GIF showing different elements).

Chair seat material (leather). There is not much special things going on here - the material was prepared in external software (Substance Painter), so we only imported textures to Blender and created material with them.

A nice tip 1: you can import all PBR textures of a material to Blender and assign them to valid slots in one click. Just enable Node Wrangler add-on, open Material Editor in Blender and press CTRL-SHIFT-T - Blender will ask you to choose your textures (base color, roughness, metallic, normal) - select them all and Blender will set-up material for you.

Nice tip 2: If you often use Substance Painter with Blender, download free plugin Substance Painter to Blender which automates moving data between those programs. Works like a charm!

Binders mesh.There are hundreds of books, binders and other office papers in the scene.

Book mesh.

We used one sun light as a main light source, coming directly from above. the rest of lighting is provided by mesh lights.

Big, rectangular mesh light. It's just a plane with emission material.

Many smaller mesh lights included in the scene.

Another mesh light - this time is a icosphere.

It's not a complete light, rather "mood light" created to make some lighting variation in the scene, but it works well and does not make rendering longer.

Camera settings. We used 82,2 FOV which is equivalent of 18,34 mm camera.

Floor uv - it is a tiled texture

Floor seen from a top view in viewport. Tiling is clearly visible here, but it is not visible in the scene, thanks to various furniture that is placed all over the place.

Render settings.

Thanks for reading! :)