My take on the final challenge from Fundamentals of Fundamentals of Blender Materials and Shading...
I wanted to apply the core ideas of the course regarding photorealism and the properties of lighting for materials and shaders -- while also injecting some style around a main theme: “Matte Black (Mostly) Everything”.
Several of the materials make use of procedurally generated noise for some subtle dynamic roughness, bump, and specularity. I also made my own image textures for the contents of the sketchbook paper, the post-it notes, and the computer monitor.
For the world lighting, I used the same “Railway Bridge” HDR from the course files, but took strength down a bit while mixing in a dark blue, moonlight-y overlay. This -- combined with applying dark coloring and matte-like finishes to most of the objects’s materials -- is intended to create a pretext for the select bits of color in the scene to really pop ✨ (A necessary flourish, one might say, with Jonathan’s janky Dell PC and iPod Nano setting us back a few decades 😛)
This is exactly the way I like it: maybe not 100% photorealistic (I mean, not like an arch vis), but also not so heavily stylised/cartoonish that it turns into a childish, toy replica of itself, if you know what I mean — like an adult, imitating baby’s talk (man, why are Blender forums so full of such stuff? 🤨 Because it’s faster to render, with heavy denoising? Well, never mind). But this work shows excellent sense of colour and style: would work well as a cover art for a book or a music album, IMO.
Saw this one on the exercises submission, awesome stuff man 🤘🏼