The Feast

Bengi Ada Tüfekci

Early Concepts

A moodboard of the images I was inspired by:

All of their references can be found on the page Resources.

They are images of still life paintings, some paintings of Caravaggio, and Federico Jiménez Fernández's "Judgement of Paris", which is the center image.

My Initial Blender Scene

I created my scene using Blender to be sure that the models I wanted to use were available. The placement of most objects was determined by the position of the door and the chicken. I chose a low camera angle to be closer to the perspective of both the chicken and the fruit on the floor.

Some progress images of my scene from Blender

Some Initial Renders of My Scene Using My Renderer

In the above images, some holes can be seen (especially on the pomegranate above the goblet), which my renderer could just not render. I chose to remove some of those models and remesh the others.
I had also initially used a stone wall mesh for the walls, but I decided to remove them in the end as I felt like the thin lens camera made it redundant.

Some Variations

After I added volume:

I used a bounded volume somewhat on a whim, and while the original renders were very noisy, denoising them produced images that appeared quite ethereal to me. I experimented with the density and the bounds of the volume to control how much "mist" filled the room.
Initially, I had also included a window on one of the walls so that the table leg was directly illuminated. However, when combined with the volume, this caused the back of the room to become significantly brighter than I intended, so I chose to remove it. Instead, I kept a small point light to provide subtle contrast.
The images above also reflect slight variations in lighting, floor texture, and some of the fruit models, not only variations in volume.

Final Image

Some Challenges I Had While Rendering My Scene

  • I had to retexture some objects because they did not export to Lightwave from Blender correctly. I also needed to bake some normal maps, and other textures like roughness textures.
  • I wanted the view of the outside to be completely white, but using a white environment map increased the brightness of the entire scene, which I did not want, and putting a white emission object straight behind the chicken blocked the directional lights. So I had to put emission objects in very specific angles so that they were still visible from the camera and did not block the directional lights.
  • I had to remesh the skull and some of the fruits because my renderer really had a hard time rendering their original meshes due to their geometry.
  • I wanted the area illuminated by the sun to be wider than a single directional light can do when coming through the crack in the door, so I used two directional lights at very small angle variations.
  • Rendering some models I exported from Blender in 1920x1080 resolution sometimes made my computer crash repeatedly. This issue seemed to occur most frequently when I had tev open while rendering, though I am not certain of the exact cause.