INTRODUCTION
Hi, my name is Ethan. I’m from China but currently studying for a Master of Automotive Design in Valencia, Spain. My journey with Blender started around 2020 during my final year in university as an industrial design student. Like most Blender users, I’m self-taught.
Besides modeling or rendering design projects, Blender also helps me tell stories in ways I could never dream of with just drawings.
INSPIRATION
The original project was a school assignment aimed at designing a proposal for a renowned Spanish furniture company called Actiu. I’ll leave the detailed design processes for anyone interested on my Behance page.
Although the schedule was unbearably hectic, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a short video to present the final work. However, the result wasn’t satisfying to me due to the rushed deadline. So here we are, 2 years later in 2023, revisiting my vision with more knowledge in both Blender and filmmaking.
DESIGN
The main focus of the design is to provide comfort and a private space for the workplace where you can either continue working or take a breather.
PREPRODUCTION
The modeling was done mostly in Blender using a non-destructive workflow (at least, that was my intention). To achieve the realistic cloth details, I turned to Marvelous Designer.
The textures mainly come from Quixel Megascan, which provides thousands of 4k high-quality photo-scanned assets. Some simple textures, like the metal, were created within Blender.
The set was modeled based on a company where I did a 6-month internship.
Some changes had to be made for better lighting and camera positioning.
The mood was set by the contrast between a cloudy, drizzling day at the office and the warm, steamy coffee placed next to the soft-looking lounge chair that is the protagonist of the film.
I drew rough storyboards to plan the shots that emphasize the concept, along with a very shallow depth of field, low contrast imagery, and almost sleepy handheld camera movement, all of which elevate the comfort level.
PRODUCTION
The raindrop is simply a procedural texture made by the 3D artist Amin Missaoui, which you can download for free here.
The steam of the coffee was rendered in a separate file that was imported as a billboard texture due to hardware limitations.
The droplets were hand-animated using Blender’s metaball feature because my laptop couldn’t afford a proper fluid sim (and the droplets only appear in a few frames with motion blur, so it doesn’t matter that much).
Here is the animation of the droplets:
The leaf wiggling was the trickiest part of this project because it involved a soft body simulation and armature-driven animation.
However, it’s not that different from the same mechanism applied in some hair or tentacles animation workflow.
For the buttons, I named this shot, Buttonflies, for an obvious reason 🙂
Here is the preview of the shot in the viewport:
And here is the rendered shot:
POST- PRODUCTION
If you’re familiar with Eevee, you know how tricky it can be to achieve the first rack focus shot through the rainy window. The trick is in the compositing, and in this case, I used Davinci Resolve.
Apart from that, I composited the coffee steam and added anamorphic lens effects such as distortion and lens flares, vignette, and film grain, followed by the color correction and grading process.
MIMO, AN OFFICE LOUNGE CHAIR FILM
Thank you for reading my article. I hope you have a great day!
About the Artist
Ethan, a filmmaker from China. An artist who is trying to be a filmmaker but has been held up by his career in design. But who said you can’t do all of them at once?
