Finished in time to submit my image. It was great fun and I am pleased with it, though I could have worked some more on a couple of details.

The scene is made completely in Blender (excepting the sky of course) and rendered with Blender Internal.

The light setup is my usual one, with AO, Environment light set on sky texture, one point light in the middle of the “hole” and two area lights in front of the openings.

It is just one scene, I tried before using linked scenes and I get so mixed up in all I’d rather have a huge file in one place. This time I used the compositor more, the exterior and interior parts are on separate render layers so I could get a glow effect on the exterior and make it more bright. I still have to figure out making a good glow. I also have a little DOF just to blur the distant background, and levels/color adjustments. The sun rays effect was something learned from the Nature academy but trying to get it in a hurry I couldn’t make the method there to work. So in the end I used a bunch of spotlights with halo enabled, positioning them to get the look and softened it in the Compositor.

I also opened the result in Gimp but didn’t change much from the original.

The objects in the foreground are meant to tell a little story and I should have made them a little more prominent and visible but didn’t have the time. The book cover reads “Emerging CG art: 2000 – 2020” and I wanted it to be a small detail but you have to look at a larger resolution image to actually see it.. And the Futuristic Gramophone was a last hour idea so I didn’t detail it as much.

The wall on the left is a moving-transformer furniture wall, like you touch a part and it extends into a kitchen table etc.

The city in the distance has a small hidden detail, just to have a laugh, the Basarab Bridge just completed in Bucharest – big objectionable  landmark.

The tree in the hole has leaves from my local park. It is made in Sapling, as the rest of the vegetation. The leaves should be at a better angle but I think it’s ok. The distant trees are also in Sapling, but very simple, no branches, just some not too thick leaves clusters, to keep things under control.

The object in the sky is of course a flying something, nonpoluting and very silent. The round hole in the roof might work as a landing dock if you put your imagination into it.

This project was something quit new for me so it was a good experience. It’s not serious as far as architecture goes, so I tried to take lightly the fact that the banister is not complying to any building codes 😛