Busy for Peace

Hello everyone! 
Thank you for taking the time to check out my project. I hope you will find something useful in this :)
Until I get some clients, everything here will be practice. 
This project is quite special to me since it marks the first year of my 3d adventure. 

Okay. So everytime I want to start a new project, I never know what to do. This is to me the most critical and time consuming part in the making of images. Unssplash is my favorite place for references. It takes me anywhere from one day to one week to gather references that I want. What happens after that one week? I change my mind and gather different references lol. 

I don't mind modeling, I actually want to get better at it and be able model as much as I can. So besides the walls and windows, I went for the silverwares and the holder. Used tyflow for simulation, pretty simple but I just felt the need to model something I'm not comfortable with. The rest of the scene was from other 3dsky and evermotion.

I recently switched to manual photography exposure, it gives me more opportunity to learn. I just rotated around my subject until I was happy with it. I've been doing a lot of straight (is that how it's called??) composition in my previous projects so I tried to avoid that for now.

Lighting was HDRI from PGsky with sky portals. This topic is still one of my biggest fight. I always have some haze in my scene and end up not having a crisp render. I did however experiment with the HDRI and applied gamma correction, with this, I was able to control the sharpness of the shadow and the overall contrast. Feel free to let me know if you have some tips. 

Nothing really complex here. Just used some poliigon textures, and modified some of Corona library. What helped me is opening the preview window and make it as big as possible, super helpful specially for making masks. I also use bitmaps instead of Coronabitmaps, I'm still new to bitmap filtering but it seems like it helps in getting a sharper render. 

High res is set at 4k. There is no need to use 4k texture if I am not going to render at 4k. Do you also save your images in PNG?

Camera RAW! That's it. I try to make everything in 3D. This is also a good practice for me when I get into animation

So after I finish a project I evaluate it and try to get something out of it it. In this case, I improved on:
- Exploring different photography angles
- Modeling wires and using Tyflow simulation
- Modifying my HDRI with gamma correction
- Using preview window for materials
- Discovering split toning
- Discovering chromatic abberation (Not used in this project)

Things I need to improve on:
- Take less time to gather reference 
- Get faster at modeling
- Explore different lighting approach
- Learn more about contrast, and shadows
- Get organized with assets and materials
- Learn more about cinematographers and colorists