500 Word Analysis on Room Visualisation Project

For this project we had to choose a book based either in the future or the past and recreate a room from an extract of the book that describes a room.  The book that I decided to base my project around is Memoires Of A Geisha. The scene that I decided to pick was the description of one of the main characters, Matsumoto; who was one of the main Geisha’s within the story. The software that we we’re encouraged to use was 3Ds MAX which was good because I was familiar with it.
My inspirations for this project were images of old style Japanese rooms, which were quite simple in design and the majority of the furniture was made out of wood. The colours of the room were quite plain, such as creams for the walls and wood for the furniture.  The lighting for the rooms were daylight, during the day as the window screens were thin so light could pierce through and during the evenings, they used candles and lamps.
When making the room, I found it quite easy to model as most the objects within were quite simple and also easy to texture as 3DS MAX had wood textures already installed within the library of the mental ray engine.
One problem when creating the room was the texturing of the mirrors within, as I had a make-up mirror as well as a full length mirror to texture. However I did not know how to create a clear mirror effect. However with some help I learned that with the mental ray engine, it already had a mirror texture installed so all I had to do was select it and apply it, which gave me a clear mirror effect.
For this project, it was important that I used a mental ray engine, compared to the normal engine that 3DS MAX uses as it enabled me to create effects like a mirrored effect and I also added some water to the scene, when the camera looks outside, so that helped as well.
Whilst working on this project I learned about the different 3DS MAX engines that are available to use, such as the mental ray engine. I also learned about lighting for a room, as the only source of lighting was from outside and I also created a beam of light, coming from outside, which gave it a good effect.
If I had more time for this project, I believe I would edit the lighting some more as well as the shadows of the objects, weren’t perfect so I would also work out how to make them smoother. However overall for this project I found it quite enjoyable and very helpful as I would like to go into environments more, so it helped me gain more skills towards the creation of rooms.