Create a Realistic Kitchen – Part 2 of 2

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

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

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

At a Glance

Screenshots from the video:

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

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?)
Slick collection of real life architecture

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)

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fergus

I had a crack at rendering the scene in cycles. I made an observation that should be taken into account for anyone using cycles. when I’m making a metal material, I use glossy BSDF but when the roughness is at 0.000, the reflections are sharp and unrealistic, and I find for a good material, you need to set the roughness to at least 0.100, if not more.
fergus

seeing this has inspired me to model my own kitchen scene. I rendered it with cycles. I included a window and behind the window was a plane with an outdoors image on it. I gave it an emission value of 5, for the illusion that outside there was light lighting up the inside.
RandomUsername

Yeah, I understand the long render times now… I tried to make a water sim in Cycles (BTW now there’s cycles, what’s better, lux or cycles?) and it was just 8 seconds and it took me something aroung 48 hours to render I had to turn off caustics because with all the glass at 1000 samples (30 mintes PER FRAME!!!!) it was still noisy, without caustics I managed to get away with 300 samples, av. 13 minutes per frame. However, go to aws.amazon.com and find the EC2 service, and for just 1$ or so per hour you can have the equivalent of 20 cpus! BUT cycles didn’t work for me
http://www.aquariumbackgroundse.com aquasource part

Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as
though you relied on the video to make your point.

You clearly know what youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your
weblog when you could be giving us something informative to read?
danx

Wow, your skills with blender and LuxRender are awesome. Thank you so much for using your valuable time to help countless others improve their Blender knowledge.

My interests focus on lighting and architecture and this ‘realistic kitchen’ tut has given me great encouragement. Especially good was the intro on LuxRender and it’s features.

Personally I don’t think your tutorials drag on or are too lengthy. Really, how can someone complain, you give your years of experience, joyfully, kindly, without cost!!

Create a Realistic Kitchen – Part 2 of 2