Hoff-kitchen-01.jpg

I brought the light down for the backdrop, and for the sunlight as they were pretty bright and were flooding the space with too much light.  I like the adjust lights function in Chief as it gives you a lot of control over the lighting by room...I shut off all the lights in the house except for those connected to this scene.

As to not get overwhelmed by all the lights, I toned down the backdrop and the sun first with all lights off. I adjusted the sunlight angles so that I could get some outside light to flood into the space (very low light setting).  I then turned on the lights in the adjacent rooms ( dining, living and laundry) then adjusted their brightness.  Then turned on the light above the sink (making sure that it was a spot), and adjusted its brightness, angle and drop off. The next lights I turned on were the under cabinet lights and simply adjusted the brightness. Finally I selected all the cans in the kitchen at once, made sure they were spots, adjusted their angle, drop off and brightness, and then did some tweaking to get the setting I wanted.

I could have taken that floor texture and exported it so that I could create a normal and AO map and reimport, but it was getting pretty late and it looks OK, but if I wanted more realism I would do that for sure.

One other item to note, on the walls, I selected a stucco texture, you cannot really see it here but if the camera gets close to the walls you see the subtle shadows created by the normal maps that relate to the texture...then if you want to change the color, just use the stain function, or change the color in the material library.