behind bars

Last week, I learned how to render using mental ray with global illumination. So for our assignment, we need to model a room and render it using global illumination. I wanted to do a simple room with a bed and a side table and maybe a lamp, but then I thought everyone would probably do that, so I changed my mind and decided to make a prison cell instead. Actually, I was inspired by a prison cell model that I saw from the internet by Simon Blanc. I liked his work a lot that I wanted to make my own.

First, I searched for pictures of prison cells on the internet to get an idea on what a prison cell looks like. I wanted to make it simple so I decided to just have a bed, a toilet, and a sink inside my scene. I also don’t intend to do a realistic model because I want my scene to be a little cartoony. I started by modeling each item. After that, I went on to model the prison cell. I just used a cube and just shaped it rectangularly. I then stretched the sides to make the walls thicker. Then, I deleted some faces on my wall to make a window. I then used a couple of cylinders for the prison bars.

I can now import the items I modeled earlier into the prison cell. Now, it’s just all about setting up the scene and placing everything where I want it to be. I also placed an area light outside the window as my source light with a picture of a moon as my background.

With everything now in place, I converted all the polygons and then added colors to my scene. I just used dark colors and adjusted the light to make my scene darker so it will look gloomy and sad. Finally, I rendered it using mental ray with global illumination. After a few more adjustments, I now have this:

I just added a few more details like the pipe, the light bulb, and the poster. So there you have it, my own prison cell. Escape this one Michael Scofield!