Emma's Place (V-Ray)

Meet Emma’s Place, a not-too-subtle homage to Swedish blogger extraordinaire Emma Fexeus.

This one was long in the making. The goal was to replicate not just a typical Scandinavian interior, but also the way these are often photographed. I’ll get back to that last point in a moment.

The inspiration came from a variety of sources, but the beautifully styled interiors of Swedish real-estate agent Fantastic Frank and the photography of Jonas Berg played a big role, as well as the ton of images ripped and saved to my gigabyte inspiration folders.

Part of the deal here was to replicate the subtle, painted-over imperfections of old buildings, from the heater pipes to the electric cables and the faint wear-and-tear marks on the walls and skirting boards. A lot of it is barely visible, as is the fact that there aren’t that many straight lines here, if you look closely.

Emma's Place (V-Ray)

One of the reasons it took so long to do was that pretty much everything was unwrapped and manually painted, in the diffuse and, occasionally, the normal and glossy channels. There was a fair bit of ZBrush sculpting too, some GrowFX for the plants, and Marvelous Designer for the fabric. Quixel Suite was used to texture some of the assets. The carpet is a VrayFur Modifier and the Corona version uses a standard 3ds Max Hair&Fur modifier.

The brick wall is a custom tileable texture derived from a photoscanned piece of wall, which means accurate displacement. A few of the assets (the wood stools, the planters, the basil leaves…) were also scanned.

Emma's Place (V-Ray)

Another area that got special attention was the exterior, which is all 3D and polymodeled in order to maintain plausibility under any angle.

Emma's Place (V-Ray)

This is the V-Ray version of the scene. But I also did a Corona version. You can see both sets of images at full res here.

The scene (with the V-Ray and the Corona versions) is available in The Warehouse as of today, and you can find it here.

For the first time, the archive includes two post-production .psd files showing a detailed break-down of my process. That process is pretty simple, and I will get back to it in a dedicated tutorial which I’ll post in the next few days, maybe earlier.

In the meantime, enjoy a few more images below and check out the full set.

Emma's Place (V-Ray)

Emma's Place (V-Ray)

Emma's Place (V-Ray)

Emma's Place (V-Ray)