The scene in its entirety.
Initially this was the secondary shot for the project, though in the end there can be only one, and this angle captures a lot more of what's in the scene.

However, with the project being inspired by noir films, it felt only right to add an overhead view to reveal further hidden details. I'm a great fan of adding silhouettes in the foreground to give a better sense of depth.

A closer view of the main area in the scene: the desk. The props here not only form part of the larger story, but allow for the construction of focal points and composition.

A slightly different angle of the desk area, here I wanted to drop a hint that there's a larger world outside the doorway. The laptop was a lot of fun to create, especially creating the random command line stencil.

A view of the active lights used, with quite a generous amount of fog. Volumetrics were an interesting challenge, some situations called for a modification to the fog's settings to increase its voxel resolution.

Some areas weren't the focal point, but are just as important to give a sense of scale and a completed area which a story could take place in. You may notice there's a bunch of reusable assets placed here. Plenty of books.

And a slightly different angle from the other side to showcase other more subtle parts of the scene such as the area in the background.

And finally a closer look at the board and doorway. The board was constructed with a combination of a base material for the polaroids and surface, whilst a few extra mesh pieces were added to give it more lift (such as the notes).

I chose to use tileable materials where possible, followed by trims to make things more efficient. Some of the props were baked, but perhaps using atlases or more integration of trims would have saved more time and given more flexibility.

The majority of the props, decals and materials used in the scene. This was the first time I made good use of decals, I found them absolutely essential to add extra detail and more convincing edges.

The project went from a vague idea to a much stronger result in the end.