In this video, I will describe the steps and operations I followed to create the rendering you see on screen, which shows a corner of a room with a small table and a computer from the very early 1990s.
3D models used in this tutorial:
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! This video is a bit different from the usual tutorials I publish on my channel. I will still talk about Blender and Substance Painter, but this time I will also share some personal memories and provide some extra information about the objects you will see. I hope you find it interesting.
In this video, I will describe the steps and operations I followed to create the rendering you see on screen, which shows a corner of a room with a small table and a computer from the very early 1990s. I will talk about the research process, the modeling of the objects, the lighting of the scene, and the Compositing used to give the render its final look.
The computer in particular was a 386 with a 14-inch monitor. It was the first computer my parents bought for me and my brothers. I do not remember the exact year, but it was certainly before 1993, because this is the only photo I have of that computer and by then it had already been moved to another room.
At first, however, the computer was placed in a corner of the dining room, which I am showing here with a photo taken more recently. I also have a photo of the desk that was used as its support. Among all my family photos, though, there is none showing the computer in its original location, so I recreated it myself in Blender.
First of all, I modeled the different components of the computer separately, namely the case, the monitor, the mouse, and the keyboard. Since I could use only that single photo as a visual reference and rely on my memories for the rest, I searched online for information about the typical dimensions of computer cases and 14-inch monitors from that era.
For the keyboard, I searched for photos of an IBM Model M, because I remember that our keyboard had that distinctive plate in the upper right corner. I also clearly remember the three-button mouse with the red mouse pad. In this case, I searched for photos of a Logitech Genius.
As for the monitor, I added a VGA connector and a power connector on the back, then the power button with the green LED and some classic controls such as brightness and contrast. Inside the monitor, I placed a geometry with thickness that acts as the front glass and uses a transparent material with refraction. Right behind it there is a Plane with an Emission Material where I placed screenshots from the two games we had on that computer at the time, namely Prince Of Persia by Jordan Mechner and Commander Keen 1 by iD Software.
For the case modeling, I also had to research the dimensions, the typical elements, and especially the connectors on the back of the case, which were very different from what we have today. Even though these elements are not visible in the render I am showing, I still wanted the back to be modeled in a believable way, because I might reuse it in other projects. I therefore added a DIN 5 connector for the keyboard, several serial and parallel connectors, a 15-pin game port, and three audio outputs, although I can tell you that my old 386 did not actually have those audio ports. I did not model the expansion slot covers with serial and parallel ports, because I created them using Normal Maps in Substance Painter. However, I clearly remember the legendary Turbo button and the Key Lock used to lock the keyboard. The case I’m showing on screen is a bit different from the one in the final render, because the one our computer had featured a raised base and did not include a 5.25-inch drive, which I instead decided to include in the case I published on my website.
The environment was very simple, and its modeling, as well as the modeling of the desk, did not require any special techniques. For this reason I did not use the fSpy add-on, which I have discussed in several tutorials on the channel and usually use for more complex scenarios. The chair, on the other hand, appears in many other photos, so I modeled it using standard measurements for this type of object: 75 cm total height and 46 cm width and depth.
The door on the left had actually been modeled many years ago when I was still a beginner using Blender 2.4, simply because at the time I practiced modeling anything I could find around me. I recovered that project, assigned new PBR Textures using Substance Painter, and there it was.
In Substance Painter, I first created the materials for the case, saving the stack of Materials as a Smart Material so that I could reuse the same colors on the other objects and keep visual consistency across the peripherals. There are no particular observations to make here, because in general I used basic techniques that I have shown in the Substance Painter tutorials published on the channel over the years. For example, I multiplied a Clouds Texture on the Color channel of the floor to make it less uniform.
For all the materials, I baked the Ambient Occlusion so I could use that map in a Multiply Layer across the entire Materials stack, in order to darken some parts of the objects. The Ambient Occlusion map was a bit too grainy in some areas, so I applied a Blur filter to it.
To obtain high resolution for the labels and other details, I placed the keyboard keys and the plates on the case and the monitor into separate Materials, each with dedicated UV seams and very large UV areas.
Assembling the scene was very simple, and I could quickly get a preview of the render by setting a Sky material for the background and adding a Sun light source. This result had a strong emotional impact for me, because it reminded me of how the computer looked during the day, for example before going to school or when I came back home.
However, I had a very specific memory of playing Commander Keen 1 in the evening, so I removed the Sun light and set the Sky intensity to 0, then added a Spot Light with a very wide cone and soft edges to simulate the ceiling lamp in the room, located to the right of the camera. Thirty years ago, most lamps were incandescent, so I set the power to 60 Watts and especially a low color temperature of about 3000 Kelvin. Interestingly, both my brothers and I clearly remember that there was no lamp on the desk.
Now we arrive at the Rendering and the Nodes Compositing used to give the final image a more nostalgic and almost photographic look. For the Rendering, I set 400 Samples with Denoise and Exposure set to 2 in the Film section, using AgX as the Color Management.
In Compositing, I inserted in sequence a couple of new Blender 5 nodes, namely Sensor Noise and Vignette, followed by a Desaturate node, Chromatic Aberration, and finally Glare set to Fog Glow mode. The Sensor Noise, Vignette, and Chromatic Aberration nodes help give the render the look of an old photograph. The Desaturate node is necessary because materials coming from Substance Painter are often too saturated, while in reality colors are rarely that vivid. The final Fog Glow node has a Threshold value set so that it produces a glow on the monitor image and on the LEDs.
In general, I set all the values of these Compositing nodes by running several tests, adjusting one node at a time and observing the preview in the Backdrop image provided by the Viewer node after the first render.
This is not the first scene I have created starting from childhood photos and memories, and in this case as well I enjoy sending the results to relatives or friends, because these images often bring back additional details for them. For example, in this case my brothers immediately told me that they remember two small brown shelves with black metal brackets holding a few VHS tapes. Perhaps I will model those objects as well in the future and complete this reconstructed memory.
Well, that is all for this video! If you enjoyed it and would like more content like this, let me know in the comments, leave a Like, and subscribe to the channel. Thanks, and see you next time!