The trouble with working with 3D graphics is that, in spite of all the advances in 3D rendering techniques, the calculations of light in a scene are mathematical approximations of how light works in the real world.

I was thinking about this when I was playing around with a standard lighting set up for a project that I’m working on in Blender. One example is how, in the real world, you rarely get truly black shadows beneath objects.

I quite often see 3D work that would look that little bit more realistic if this simple fact had been taken into account and steps taken to fix it.

In my standard scene setup (top-right) I have a sphere primitive placed on my studio object (just a smoothly curved floor to wall object). It’s lit by a lamp and a spotlight. The underside of the sphere is unnaturally dark.

By adding an area light beneath it at a low energy setting (bottom-right), the darkness can easily be corrected to make the scene look and feel more realistic.

Stage 6 : Wall tiles applied

I live in a small one bedroomed flat and the bathroom in it is pretty small. Most of the bathrooms modelled in 3D that I see online are either unrealistically large or unrealistically luxurious so I thought it would be fun to model the bathroom of the flat I live in. It’s neither huge or luxurious.

I’ve completed the walls, floor and ceiling and applied the wall tiles to the bathroom. I also created rough models of the sink and bath to give the bathroom context. Here’s a render of the work in progress.

The next steps will be to model the skirting boards and the bathroom window (as you can see, I’ve already created the billboard of the rear yard that will be visible through the window).