I wanted a decent exercise to speed up my modeling and to try and render heavier scenes using Cycles in blender, so I modeled my kitchen.. 🙂

This is all done in Blender 3D using the Cycles render engine which is both open source and free! I used a 360 HDR image as background, aligned the horizon, amplified the exposure and used is as the only source of light to copy daylight as close as possible. For the modeling part there’s not much special going on, except for having to learn how to deal with lots of objects and grouping and using parent/child hierarchy.

The last picture is a render of the evening scene, dark outside and artificial lighting on, 5 spots and 2 tubes under the cabinets. I was quite happy with the result, resembles the real life situation quite close.