Cardplayers in a sunlit room

As part of a personal study on composition, I decided to revisit classic paintings and create my version of them. This is the second part of this study (the first one, loosely based on a Vermeer's painting can be seen here).

For this piece, I decided to do "Cardplayers in a Sunlit Room" (oil on canvas, 1658) by dutch painter Pieter de Hooch. It is an example of the so called Dutch Golden Age painting and currently part of the Royal Collection on display at the Queen's Gallery in London. You can learn more about the painting here.

This time, the focus was on the composition: using the Golden Spiral, Hooch created an asymmetric composition that drags the eye from the top of the frame and goes over the door and ends on the quartet playing cards. Although not obvious at first glance, this composition makes perfect sense and gives the painting a delicate balance.

For the 3D part: I used 3ds Max 2023 and V-Ray 6.1. Models and textures are largely from Quixel Megascans, which is an awesome source for old stuff such as the crates, bench, chairs, etc. I was not interested in modeling this time, so I relied heavily on pre-made models and materials (Chaos Cosmos, Quixel and Poliigon).

The detail shots above were all rendered in Chaos Vantage. It's such an awesome tool, so fun to work with. The render is practically instantaneous, which allows me to literally walk around the room looking for interesting shots, play with depth of field, light, etc. It's the best companion to V-Ray I can think of, and it's blazing fast (around 15 seconds per shot). Of course, it lacks some of V-Ray's more advanced functionalities, but if you do have a decent GPU (I'm using a 3080) it's a no-brainer.