My own kitchen has seen a great deal of blending this year in the form of creamy soups or fruit puree but now I have put it into my computer Blender. I’m trying to decide on some extra shelving that we’ll  probably get from Ikea.

I like the way the light in this scene turned out (blender internal only), unfortunately I didn’t have the patience to add some accessories and make this into a gallery image. I also am not sure about the shelves yet. Instead I modelled the odd beams and gas ducts on the ceiling for added realism 🙂 I did skip the bread crumbs under the table though…

The light scheme I used:

The lamp, which I didn’t manage to texture properly, is also Ikea but I had an artistic impulse and painted it. To tell the truth it got badly scratched in storage so I had to fix this so we don’t have to buy another one.  It really looks like this (celebrating its installment):

this is not a render 🙂

I also used this image to test a little free application found here: Motiva

I don’t often make posts about other software than Blender, but this one seemed so simple to use to nice effect. It’s something like an image editor that gives a render a bit of photo feeling, with many presets emulating different types of film cameras. You can also add a vignette and chromatic aberration – that stuff on the edges of objects I so much try to avoid when taking pictures 🙂 I gave it a try. An inspired post-processing of an architectural visualisation render can do a great deal for photorealism, especially when you are making do with less realistic  renderers like BI.

Camera presets

So, the render at the top of the post is the Motiva edited version. The actual untouched render is this:

To conclude, I don’t think it does anything you can’t achieve in Gimp or Blender compositor, but maybe it can help in some cases for a fast fix. I’ll keep it installed for a while and see if I get to use it some more. I’d be curious to know what other people think. There is also another really interesting software on that site, Colima, but it’s not free and I think much difficult to integrate in a Blender workflow.