Right now I’m in the process of trying to up my game for my YouTube channel, since I’ve been making more gameplay videos…when I get around to to playing games. I have been spending my time in Blender and Resolve, switching up my ideas mid-stream.

My first thought was to capitalize on my age by creating the image you see above. I was planning on putting some kind of screenshot montage on the TV, in horrible 0.00001K resolution, and the demo I had created looked just “OK”. I think the desaturation, some wild chromatic aberration, and a light dusting of scanlines made the video look pretty good, but I wasn’t happy with the overall vibe of the whole thing. So I kept it as a render.

This was my original TV reference image. I have no idea what kind of TV it is, though, but it seemed simple enough to work with although I had many others to choose from.

I didn’t model the plant nor the glass bowl of candy; @CakedCrusader campaigned for the “Grandma bowl” to be added, so I found that and the plant online and added them to the scene.

The table was just something I had thrown in there to add some additional eye-work to the scene. I think the light wood of this table was pretty ubiquitous during the late 1980s/early 1990s because I know I had a coffee table almost exactly like this, although this one came from this reference image.

So once again, what’s good, what’s bad. The good: I did a pretty bang-up job of getting the texturing applied. None of it is my own; I relied on BlenderKit once again, but one thing I’ve learned is “box projection” to unwrap, and that it’s OK to move, resize, and rotate faces on the UV map to get wood grains running the right way, and at the right scale. I particularly love the side-table’s texturing. Also good: the design of the TV. When I first started Blender I thought a single model had to be a single piece. Now, I will grab faces, dupe them, and separate them to work on them as their own entities. This way, I don’t have to create loop-cuts everywhere, because that way lies madness. I also like the carpet to a lesser extent. It’s a basic noise texture, but I ventured into the world of particle hair to create the fibers and I don’t know if you can tell from these images, but the carpet has a little bit of pile going on there.

Now the not-so-good. Once again, lighting is my foil. I think the overall redness of these images is due to the reflection of the shiplap wall behind the items. Back int he 80’s, we didn’t have a wide range of temperatures on offer for our lightbulbs, and they were pretty much in the 1000k-2500k range. I like this range, personally, as it gives a real “homey” look. However, the wall bounces too much red on top of the carpet adding some orange, and the dark wood of the TV console itself not helping matters either. There’s also a problem with the camera. The TV looks…off. Like, off-kilter. I tried playing around with the camera’s focal length and sensor size, but I couldn’t get everything to even out.

I am quite proud of these items (the wall was custom designed with a BlenderKit texture, so I’m not talking about that). I might throw them up onto BlenderKit for free, on the off chance they might be useful to someone else.