I used my Blender scene setup again for this asset, but this time, I removed the floor plane and added one to the wall behind the shelf. I changed the lighting slightly, and added the world texture as I did for the table as I found that the lighting from the world made the lighting more realistic. I then started to render this with what I thought was the same settings, not realising that I had ‘square sampling’ ticked in the render settings, meaning that the render time was around 12 hours for the 2 passes. once this had completed, I realised that my null object which my shelf was attached to had been on the first layer, but the shelf was actually on both layers, thus meaning my node tree had no effect when it came to adding the shadows in on the final composite.
This was a time costly mistake, but it taught me to check everything carefully before rendering when times are that high.
I re-rendered this after fixing the layers, and also adding a plane to the second wall, as I noticed the shadows were wrong and only on the back wall. I rendered this out, noticing that square sampling was ticked (which I then turned off). This sped up my render times to around 2.5 hours for both passes, which was a huge improvement.
Once this had rendered, I realised that the corner of my two planes was not in the corner of the room exactly. this meant that the shadow is actually not in the corner of the room, which is an issue. I realised this, and changed it. The reason I couldn’t see it before was because it can only be seen when the plane has been removed. My solution to this is to do a very low quality render quickly to check the shadow positions before the high quality render. this may take a few minutes extra, but will save me wasting hours at a time rendering compositions which aren’t correctly lined. Once I had fixed this, my shadows aligned perfectly. I think that this is my favourite asset of the 3, I feel as though it shows how far I have come, and how much I have learned during this project.
