Black coffee and Black office with Cycles (Profile)

The project profile series of Blender 3D Architect is a collection of articles aiming for feature projects related to architectural visualization. We invite talented artists to share additional details about each project to demonstrate how they approach each stage. And also allow each author to publicize their work among our readers.

How does it work? It is like an interview, where we sent a couple of questions about a project for the artist.

If you want to check previous project profiles, visit this link.

Today we have a project named Black coffee and Black office from architect and digital artist Levi André, which used Blender Cycles, a unique set of render from this project with dark themed colors, leather, and wood.

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What is unique about this project? Besides the render and lighting, you will notice that this project plays with different types of materials. Unlike many modern designs with clean and bright tones, it bets heavily on dark shades with surfaces like leather and wood.

Let me thank Levi André for sharing the details about the project with Blender 3D Architect readers.

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Was it a commercial project? What can you tell us about the motivation for this project?

No, it was a study case to approach black (essentially in walls) as the main material with a twist of gold.

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Did you use any references for modeling, like technical drawings?

No, I did not use technical drawings. Instead, I looked for some references for office design and furniture in general.

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Did you model everything in the project, including furniture and props?

Most of the models are downloaded free assets. The only things I’ve modeled were the desk, the bookshelf, and the ceiling spot lamps.

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What can you tell us about the interior design (Layouts, materials, and props)? Did you have to create it yourself?

I had the Layout idea “sitting” around in my mind for a long time. Since the use of dark colors in interior design is rare and taboo in my country, I was looking to approach an Office Design with black as the main tone. I preferred to go simple about materials. Most of them are just “Principled Shaded tweaking materials,” as I call because I “play” with parameters as Roughness, Specular, and Base Color. For wood and fabric, I used the textures that came with the models and adjusted them according to the lighting setup. The props were carefully picked to fit the scene as a whole.

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How long did it take from start to finish?

From research to modeling, lighting, texturing, rendering, and post-production, it took around 10 hours.

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What hardware did you use to render? Can you share some render times?

I used an Intel Core i5–7400, CPU 3.00 GHz with16GB Ram on a GTX 1060
3GB.

Render times were less than 20 minutes per image with Optix Denoiser applied on compositor and 150 to 200 samples maximum.

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Can you share any details about the lighting process?

For lightning, I used essentially and HDRI as the main source of light. All the spotlights are IES textures.

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Did you use any Add-ons or external tools to create the project?

I used Archipack to create the wooden floor and Adobe Photoshop for post-production.

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What would you say was the most challenging aspect of working on this project?

The most challenging aspect of working with this project was to make sure that the black material stood out without being too forced. At first, I was struggling to think out of the box. The initial design was too clean with lots of clear materials. I had to break some cultural design barriers to express how I see and feel about the use of black
walls on an office design.

If you want to share any additional details about the project, feel free to send it!

Even though it was challenging, this project achieved the goal of breaking a design pattern in my country and experiment with what I learned with Blender so far. I could deep dive into shading, adding imperfection, and so on, but I felt the need to keep it simple as well. Being featured on Blender Artist Community with this project was the best award I’ve achieved with Blender so far.

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Thanks again to Levi Andréd for sharing details about their work. You can check more projects from him at Behance or Instagram. His studio has an Instagram profile at Holen Studio.