Lighting study

While browsing public listings of rental apartments I have often stumbled upon images of rooms in varying conditions that have been ‘digitally stylized’. There is a lot of variation in the quality and level of these digital stylizations. It is easy to smirk at them, thus I wanted to find out how much effort goes into making one, a realistic believable one.

While looking through listings of apartments in order to find reference cases of digitally stylized rooms, I identified 3 main types of use cases:

1️⃣ Case 1: The Mismatch. The worst cases were the old apartments, in a less-than-ideal condition, with walls stained from indoor smoking, mixed with digitally stylized modern furniture (see video: case 1).
2️⃣ Case 2: The Tasteful edit. Most common cases, it is not that big of a contrast. With just slight tasteful edits and neutral refurnishing the room can be made to look a lot more appealing (see video: case 2).
3️⃣ Case 3: The Total transformation. Maybe most beneficial cases were really old and furnished apartments, that are in good condition. A complete digital stylization can make a huge difference without being untasteful (see video: case 3).

After comparing and analyzing lots of references, I came to the conclusion, that the biggest giveaway has to do with light and shadow. That little something that makes the digital furniture feel slightly off or detached, is due to how it reacts, reflects and is part of its surroundings. This is to be expected because the furniture is likely created, assembled and rendered in some external software (or with AI), but they struggle be precise enough without the surrounding context.

How I tackled this challenge with couple of simple steps:
1️⃣Project the reference image into a 3D -software, I always use Blender & fSpy -addon for this.
2️⃣Create a simple block-out of the room.
3️⃣Recreate the lighting.
4️⃣Add furniture.
5️⃣Render final image.

Conclusion:
If you just want to rent or sell your apartment, digital furnishing generated by AI in couple of minutes is probably enough to do the job (anyone can do this for free nowadays).

But if your apartment is in seriously bad condition, consider creating (or paying someone to create) a completely digitalized model out of it, instead of only editing furniture in it, it will not be enough to save it.

What I learned:
From a 3D artist's perspective, this turned out to be essentially a re-lighting study. I find the process of figuring out the light & reflection sources, determining where the light originates and how it interacts with different surfaces and replicating that fascinating.. Admittedly, this process involved a fair amount of trial and error, but for me the end result was satisfying enough to justify the effort.
Overall, it was a fun challenge for one Sunday. 👌