Behind the Scenes: Coffee Time

INTRODUCTION

Hello, everyone, I am Sakib Ahmed Rigdhi. I am from Bangladesh. Currently, I am pursuing an Honors Degree in English literature in one of the public universities here. In terms of artistic background, I have been doing art since I was 6 or 7 but I never had formal art training in general. I  picked up 3D back in 2019 after learning about Blender and since then, I have been trying to keep up with it through self learning. The amazing community of Blender and 3D in general has kept me going for this long.

Although I started 3D as a hobby,  I do want to get into a studio once I get a bit better. Well, that's enough about me so let me walk you through the whole process of this artwork that I have done here.

INSPIRATION

I have been in a huge art block and still am since the start of the year 2024 due to Image Generative AI and other various things, but a recent social media site called Cara made me quite energetic as it was solely focused on art without generative AI with its current licensing system. Users and artists were promoting a Koffee donation campaign that was inspiring people to donate. I was hugely inspired by one of the artist’s promotional campaigns there and it immediately sparked an idea in my brain.

Once I had gotten the jolt of electricity running through my brain, I sat down and drew a very basic rough concept and got myself going. The idea that I had in my brain was about a cozy render that had a stylized look. Moreover, I have been meaning to do a proper stylized project after being hugely burnt out from tackling realistic projects. 

PROCESS

Gathering References

Like all of my projects, I started this one by gathering references. I went to Pinterest and Google to gather as many references as I could, and to make the process of reference gathering easier, I used “PureRef” software. It makes the whole process a lot easier as one can easily organize the references as well.

Add different notes, etc. I was mostly looking for pictures that gave me the vibe of artistic looks. Here you can take a look at my PureRef board.

Blockout & Modeling

The blockout phase is the most important phase after collecting references, as it sets the foundation of the entire project. I did the blockout using a very primitive cup-like shape, then added an early camera to understand the composition I was going for. After a few iterations, I was satisfied with my blockout phase and moved on to the modeling phase.

Modeling was fairly easy, as it was just a cup, a plate, and a couple of biscuits. I used the subdot modeling technique to tackle this. I made the models look a bit wobbly and chonky on purpose to give it a stylized aesthetic. Every model was done inside Blender. After the modeling, I did some basic UV unwrapping and moved on to texturing once every object was modeled and UVed.

Texturing

The texturing part of this project took the most time. Since the beginning of this project, I wanted to tackle an artistic, painterly texture. I used Substance Painter to texture paint most of the objects in this project.

I started the texturing process after adding some base colors and basic generators using fill layers. I used blur slope and masks to create some basic color variation procedurally. Once I was satisfied with the base colorings, I started to hand paint using the paint layer. The Paint layer in Substance Painter lets me easily texture paint like Blender or 3Dcoat. After putting on the paint layer, I went to the diffuse/base color channel view and painted to my heart's content. I painted it with a warm/cool color sense to give it a good contrast. It took me a few hours to get it to this stage.

Once I was done with the base channel, I used an anchor point in the base color’s parent folder and then used it as a basis to generate a roughness map. Then, I tweaked the roughness map to make it PBR.

After the cup and plate, I moved on to other models of the scene. I modeled the books and biscuits in the same manner. For biscuits, I only used one texture and model, which I later instanced throughout the scene. I used somewhat of a complimentary color in different models to make the scene pop out more. Although it was an iterative process, it worked out quite nicely at the end. With all that being done, I moved on to lighting it.

Lighting

I used an indoor hdri with very low intensity as the first base light. Then I built on top of it using 4 different light sources, including a sunlamp that creates a keylight on the cup, and I used Cycles to have a bit more bounce lighting in my scene. The goal was to complement the texture through my lighting. 

Here’s the light setup.

Post-processing

With lighting being done, I was closing to finish the project. Once I was fully satisfied with the lighting, I tweaked the previously set camera a bit more and then rendered it. After rendering it, I asked for some feedback on different Discord servers and then did some further tweakings. Once I was done with everything, I rendered it and started to post-process in Photoshop. For post-processing, I added a 2D smoke on top of the coffee and added some film grain as well as some color gradings and called it done.

RENDER: Coffee Time

And that was all, folks. Thank you for reading through my behind-the-scenes of this project. Assalam Walaikum (peace be unto you) & have a nice day!

About the Artist                       

Sakib Ahmed Rigdhi is a self-taught  3D prop and environment artist from Bangladesh. He is currently majoring in English literature as well as open to work in any remote studio as a part-time/full-time artist.