Art Thief's Attic

Hey y'all! For the past few months I've been working on this dramatic, prop-dense interior attic scene which is heavily inspired by a gorgeous piece of concept art by Raymond Hanhao. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxQvwV 
This project was a rigorous exercise of composition, interior lighting, set-dressing, efficient hard-surface prop creation, and large + small scale material work. My goal for this piece was to take all the 3D environment art skills I've been building the past couple years and push them as hard as I possibly could, while also picking up and applying procedural modeling skills with Houdini. I'd been wanting to create an environment piece based on this concept art for a long time now, and what had stumped me was how to go about modeling a crystal chandelier which rests on the ground and has beads which interact with gravity realistically. Thus, I took the opportunity to learn something brand new and utilize Houdini's Vellum simulations to procedurally create the chandelier's crystal beads. Another big challenge with this project was figuring out an efficient way to model the old radio boxes, as the concept features multiple unique radios, and taking the time to uniquely model all of them would take ages. My solution was to create a singular radio box and a kit of knobs, dials, and switches that I could rearrange to create unique faces. This project also led me to dipping my toes into cloth simulation, where some of the scene's tarps were simulated in Houdini and others like the curtains were created in Marvelous Designer. All other props were modeled by myself in Maya and textured in Substance Painter. Tiling materials were done in Substance Designer. 
- 
I'd really like to thank all my professors and peers at Champlain College, including my good friends CJ Spanier and Hayden McManus for their invaluable critique and guidance throughout this project.