…Well, in 3D of course. I rent a small apartment in Jersey City so no way I will be getting a new kitchen. But one can dream. OR in my case, I can make one in 3D.
I always love looking at CG kitchen or CG food related things. There is something very personal about the kitchen. Probably because it is a very primary element as a human being. There were many attempts in the past where I tried making a kitchen scene when I was still a student studying CG. Each attempt was better than the last but never satisfying. Here, take a look at my very first attempt on making a kitchen. This was my final assignment during my first year at SVA graduate program in 2014.
I learned 3 things after this project:
liked doing lighting work in 3D.
Modeling is the most boring process in the world and I hate it.
I love making virtual food and kitchen knick-knacks.
Number one and three, I still love doing, but Number 2 changed from hate to ‘it’s not too bad’. Anyway, a couple years later, I graduated and decided to work on a new CG food scenery while looking for a job. Which by the way is the one that I currently have on the work page of my website.
This one is done in 2016. At the time my focus was to practice Arnold renderer and lighting so I bought about half of the models from online. It is a significant improvement from 2014 for sure, but now looking at it with more experience, I think I can do a lot better than this now.
Fast forward to 2019 and here I am going for the 3rd attempt now. So I found this photo online couple weeks back and thought it would be fun to make this scene in CG and use it as sort of lighting practice scene. I also found this really lovely character rig from Gabriel Salas that I can put it in the scene with some look development work. I thought about making it for a real-time engine but decided to go for “traditional“ method of Maya and Arnold so I can practice more on that end.
And this is my progress so far. I took the inspiration from the photo but giving some my original take here and there. After all, I can do anything I want because it’s not a client project :)
For this project, I am trying to build everything in the scene from scratch to get better at modeling as well. It’s still the most boring part of the process but it’s quite satisfying to see them starting to coming along. I am trying to block out the “big chunk” first and then move on to those small props. I love making small props! I also need to decide if I want to make a food 3D model or purchase one because food modeling is a beast of its own. I did buy some stuff to do Photogrammetry at home last year but haven’t fully tried it yet. I could try that out for this project but if I am going to buy one thing for this project, that would be the food modeling. I guess we will find out as we go along.
My initial goal was to finish the scene by this weekend but the holiday season is now over and projects are picking up its pace at work. So I don’t think I will get done by then. Hopefully, I can get it done by Martin Luther King Jr. Day so I can move on to look development.
Well, that’s it for now!