Family Dining

This is a lighting study rendered in Unreal Engine 4. The intent of this piece is to display my experience with complex materials.
I wanted to capture detailed subsurface, clearcoat, and glass materials, while creating a visually striking composition and realistic lighting.
I focused on a small scene with a variety of materials, like plastic, glass, paper, metal, etc. Ensuring each material looked convincing was the primary challenge. I spent significant time comparing my render to the reference, until values looked near identical. Another challenge was ensuring materials reacted to lighting correctly, comparing the lighting only to the detailed lighting render shows how much of an effect the materials have on the lighting of the scene. I also used screen space reflections, normally I don't like SSR because the results are noisy and inaccurate, however here it added better reflections to the underside of surfaces like the small porcelain bowl and the salt & pepper shaker lids. Combined with planar and sphere reflection captures this worked well to make convincing and realistic reflections.
This piece was created from start to finish in about 30 hours. With a couple hours of touch up work.
I created all of the assets seen here except for the skybox.
The skybox used is a HDRI "Leadenhall Market" authored by Andreas Mischok
The reference photo used was "I-70 Diner" by Citizenswaine.