Vintage Telephone 3D model

Decided to upload the vintage telephone model from my femme fatale project to Sketchfab. For the site's real-time purposes I had to bake a couple texture maps for the global illumination using Cycles. There's even some actual environment reflections in the scene; it's a real treat to use Sketchfab's own editor nowadays. Feel free to check out the model in interactive 3D.

 

Vintage Telephone by Ilmari Saari on Sketchfab

I've headed to some very exciting new territories during the last few months. Right now I'm working on something that's going to be so cool once it's finished. More on that later.

'Femme Fatale' renders

So what's changed since I posted last time about this?

Well, pretty much everything:

The final render

I ended up with this particular composition that I felt told the best story. It allows multiple different interpretations about the situation: is she about to call someone or has she just heard something awful via the phone.

It was fun to create a real vintage telephone from scratch. I used some references of early telephones from the 1920s but my version is not any specific model. It's a combination of features that I think looked the best.

An early wireframe. Notice the minor differences.

After finding the right direction, I decided that I need an armchair for the character to sit on. So I modeled one myself. It's a relatively simple piece but making the imperfections and the ropes on the seams was something that took a while to create.

I also had to tweak the things that the character is wearing. The pieces of jewelry are now much more distinguishable which makes her have a much more elegant vibe. Even the dress of the character is entirely different than in the previous posts. Long story short I made a more detailed version and sculpted the wrinkles by hand.

There's even a 3D modeled cigarette that the character's holding and some faint smoke effects in the scene. One particular reason for that was that I wanted to make use of the new smoke rendering capabilities in Cycles. I made the effect by using the wind and turbulence force fields inside Blender.

Here's a look behind the scenes:

Tweaked GLSL viewport view

One thing that was particularly challenging was finding the right pose for the character. Many of the poses felt very stiff and it is easy to end up making the character look entirely lifeless. I had to for example tweak the arms of the character with shape keys to fix some minor issues that was caused by the rig. It's a pretty decent pose in my opinion but not a perfect one by any means...

I put together a small collage of various different test renders that I grabbed last month. It shows how I refined the new direction one small adjustment at a time.

Look development