Create a Realistic Kitchen in Blender - Part 2 of 2 | Blender Architecture

Create a Realistic Kitchen – Part 2 of 2

Posted on 27. Jul, 2010 by Andrew Price in Architecture, Lighting, Tutorials

Last week we finished modelling the kitchen scene, and this week we’re going to render it :)

Now when it comes to rendering interiors, the Blender internal engine unfortunately falls a bit short. Global illumination is crucial to achieving realism and that’s something that Blender currently lacks. So for this tutorial, we will be exporting the scene to an external renderer called LuxRender.

If you are new to external renderers, don’t worry! The first 8 minutes is a complete Introduction to External Rendering, which answers the most common questions beginners have.

This 43 minute tutorial will teach you:

How to install LuxRender and render your first scene
The benefits of using external renderers over Blender’s internal renderer
3 different environment settings and their use
How to apply materials to multiple objects at once
How to pause a render
How to use lightgroups to adjust lighting in real time
How to enable real world camera settings in LuxRender
How to add bloom and glare to a finished render

Watch the tutorial

Note: This tutorial is Part 2. Click here to watch Part 1.

Chapter marks

Bored? If you know what you’re doing, feel free to skip ahead!

0:28 – Introduction to External Renderers
8:33 – How to Install LuxRender
10:26 – Rendering your first scene in LuxRender
18:07 – Kitchen Tutorial start
19:36 – Adding the materials
28:44 – Setting up the Lighting and environment
36:10 – Adding bloom, glare and playing with LightGroups

>>Download the finished .blend – 16mb<<

Note: The LuxRender script may not be able to locate the floor and bench textures. If so, unpack the textures from the .blend and tell the script to use a directory on your hard drive.

Congratulations on completing the architecture tutorial series! I hope you’ve taken something from it. As usual I’m looking forward to seeing your results :)

Need some Inspiration?

20 Architectural renders that break the mold
35 Stunning Interior Renders
Wicked bachelor pad – The Devoto House (who will be the first to make this in Blender?) :P
Slick collection of real life architecture

140 Responses to “Create a Realistic Kitchen – Part 2 of 2”

Amezke

30. Jul, 2010

Hi, sorry about my english but i’m spanish.

Now that you have made a tutorial about external renderers, it would be nice to comment the differences betwen the biased and the unbiased renderer, becouse I suppose that for some purposes one will be better than another.

Thanks for this website, I’m a “newbie” and it’s helping me a lot.

PD: Tom, in my case, the image is being saved periodically in “BLENDER FOLDER\.blender\scripts\bpydata” as a PNG file. I think I haven’t touched anything in exporting options, so I think that is that way by default.
DonProtz

31. Jul, 2010

Hey Guys, Hey Andrew,
i tried to improve my kitchen, i render it about 23 hours and then i realized that it looks okay but it is far away from looking like a real photo. I would be happy if you could give me some tips to make it to look real,hmm.
Thanks
Don
here the links:
http://i25.tinypic.com/9ql37s.jpg
http://i31.tinypic.com/dncchx.jpg
ickathu

01. Aug, 2010

TOTALLY AWESOME DUDE!!!! LOL, but seriously this is an amazing tutorial. I love LuxRender. But, the only problem is that the computer I use is not fast enough to run this scene in LuxRender, so I was wondering, how many RAM is your computer that you use? I havent been able to finish the lightning tutorial, and now this one, because the RAM is not high enough…. :’(
jose

01. Aug, 2010

thank you my friend. I rendered with yafaray, the result is not the best. but I did my best.

http://i27.tinypic.com/bhbx3c.jpg
DonProtz

01. Aug, 2010

Hey Guys, Hey Andrew,
hmm i try to improve my render, but after 23 hours of render-action, i realized that it looks good but not realistic… I need tips to improve my renders that they look more real.
hmm if it is possible to explain… ^^ anyway, take a look:
http://i30.tinypic.com/vzg8z8.jpg
comments are welcome, thx. Don
RadioactiveMonkey

02. Aug, 2010

Hi Andrew

How long did it take to render your final scene?
juan

02. Aug, 2010

Really good I’m waiting for the 2.5 update !!
Nick

02. Aug, 2010

@Jose & DonProtz:
I noticed there aren’t any wood textures, and don’s oven looks matte… i use specular maps and slight bump maps for stuff like metals. Jose, your chairs also look like they could use a little sparkle… pretty good for a first try though!
Tyler

02. Aug, 2010

Fantastic tutorial as usual! I greatly look forward to the next one!
Michael

02. Aug, 2010

I think I got a problem. I installed the new Blender from blender.org (installer for windows 64 bit) but there isn’t any .blender/scripts folder. :-(
Jerry

03. Aug, 2010

here is mine 1st kitchen:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51851421@N02/4854538729/

still learning luxrender…
Michael

03. Aug, 2010

I think there is something wrong with the proportions @Jerry I mean, look at the sink, the boards at the wall and then the cupboards which stand on the florr. ;-)
Jerry

03. Aug, 2010

@Micheal

yep – needs some more work..
I was cot up into getting something to render in luxrender ..
to play around with.. that I did not think to much into that..
thanks for pointing it out.. will give me something to work on going forward!

:-)
viv morresey

03. Aug, 2010

Hi,
Lux is very cool, and we know that render HQ scenes will take forever to create.

We have created a plug in for luxrender on blender to allow you to run the job on our servers for FREE.

Yup, absolutely FREE. Why?

We are moving to new infrastructure so we don’t mind thrashing the old stuff.

We also want to understand do people want to render One frame or Multiframes. The more we know the better.

https://www.greenbutton.net/pages/blog#post211
jose

03. Aug, 2010

thanks @nick I¨ll try to produce better textures… you right, I don´t use any bump.
Ikari Gendo

04. Aug, 2010

Hi Andrew this is my test with Blender Internal render

I know, Is too far from a good result, but there a lot tweaking to make so.
Take about 3h for rendering in 2.53 with color magnament, and ray tracing AO.

http://img815.imageshack.us/img815/2224/cozinha4.jpg
Ikari Gendo

04. Aug, 2010

Final

http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/1719/coszinha.jpg
Steven

05. Aug, 2010

Hey, I found a good source for the light temperatures and such. It’s http://www.lightbulbsdirect.com/page/001/CTGY/ColorTemp Hope this helps. It also says that the inside lightbulb temperature is in the range (2700-3600)
Ikari Gendo

05. Aug, 2010

Sorry, i posted the wrong image, my bad.
That is the final result:

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/654/cozinha5a.jpg

=)
Your tutorials help me a lot, you have no idea!
Sorry by my english, i’m an brazilian guy.
Michael

05. Aug, 2010

Hi Ikari,

it looks very good :-) but there is something that disturbs me, it is the texture of the wood, you got the same texture 3 times and this isn’t realistic ;-)
Ikari Gendo

05. Aug, 2010

That because i use just the the blend file textures .

You’re right, now that you said it was realized how strange.
It seems a little “yellow”, I will fix it.

Thanks! =)
Guillaum

05. Aug, 2010

@Andrew, you can also pause the rendering with blender, but it is a “trick”

The idea is to ask the operating system to supsend your program (ie. blender). For example, on linux you have some way to do it. The easier if you use a desktop env like gnome or kde is to open the process management program and click “supsend/pause/stop” program. For geek, it like kill -SIGSTOP pid_of_blender

This kind of trick is also doable on window, but i really don’t know how ;)
Rory

08. Aug, 2010

My render looks blue…
valk

08. Aug, 2010

Watched till the end :) I knew about Yafaray, and now glad to be familiar with this amazing LuxRender. Great tutorial, thanks, no more comments! :)
luke

14. Aug, 2010

thanks so much i did not even know that that external rendering extisted
Corey

14. Aug, 2010

Did you have to use a separate machine to have both versions of blender or did you have them on one machine. I can’t seem to do this without 2.53 opening as 2.49
Darren

16. Aug, 2010

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the great tutorials… Other people have asked the same thing, but I’d be really keen to know how long it took to render the final image and what your system spec is.

I’ve been rendering a basic kitchen scene for over 5 hours and it’s still pretty grainy. I was getting some pretty decent images from yafaray in a lot less time… Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Thanks once again.
Darren.
tattz

17. Aug, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc6q58A4jew

This is what I came up after being inspired by your tutorial!
Thanks alot and keep those good tuts coming!
RiGuy

18. Aug, 2010

I never even knew this external rendering world existed. Absolutely mind blowing! Thanks so much.
kingcreole

18. Aug, 2010

you can work while the renderer in blender is working ^^ theres a back to previous button and if you want to see blender render again you just start the uv editor and bam there it is still rendering ^^ i guess i´ll get luxrender for preview renders soon
elias

18. Aug, 2010

My applause to you! I have open Lux Render for myself! Just WOW!!! AWESOME!!!

THANK YOU!
Julian

19. Aug, 2010

i made this, got some inspiration from you video.
http://jvillella.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/photo-realistic-kitchen/
cedal

21. Aug, 2010

@Ikari Gendo
I am amazed that you achieved that in blender! That’s really awesome!

but one thing that luxrender Does better is that light effect like when you put a glass in the light, then the ‘lens’effect.
that can (or can’t) be seen on the bottom of your render that mirror-object.

I just hope you understand my english and keep up the good work!
cedal

21. Aug, 2010

@Andrew.
Another great tutorial! Great introduction for new people in the external render world.
I’m glad I know this website!
Michael

21. Aug, 2010

@cedal

This light effect calls “caustics” :-)
Jackienp

25. Aug, 2010

Very good tutorial. Now I can use Luxrender. Thank you very much.
franck3d

31. Aug, 2010

Great tutorial!
I just stumbled on this one today and am having a blast watching it.
I did see one thing I wanted to suggest. When you were working on randomizing the stack of plates, I thought of an easier way to do it.
If you go into edit mode and shift all the vertices along x and y just a little then use an empty as the object offset in your array, you can rotate the empty and the arrayed objects will all shift off center.

That’s what I thought you would do. It also has the added benefit of not having to apply the modifier.

I can’t wait to get to part 2!!
siddharth choudhary

03. Sep, 2010

thankyou very much andrew…i am new to blender and this has been very helpful.i loved your tutorial.
john leigh London UK

05. Sep, 2010

great stuff – really helpful guide for Luxrender- wondered though if you would recommend Yafaray for this kind of stuff?