My inspiration for this project was an image I saw, while listening to some music during a trip in our car with my friends. I don’t know why, but something really grabbed me into the world of this image, when I saw it for the first time. I instantly wanted to bring it to life and render an animation.
I later found out, that it is the album cover from Bon Jovi’s This House Is Not For Sale album.
I modeled the candle and the hourglass for another project I was working on, but I thought that these props would fit perfectly into the scene. So I modeled a small table, the chair, newspaper and simulated the table cloth using Houdini et voilà we have a nice looking abandoned house. To make it more realistic, I added some little rocks and dust and some spider webs.
I am very happy with how the volumetrics turned out. the fog gives the whole scene this hazy look and the sun shining through the window just creates nice looking god rays.
The floor is just a free texture from the Quixel Megascans Library. For the chair I used a little bit of Xpresso to rotate the chair based on its position. It’s basically like a car wheel rig.
The model of the house could have turned out better, but during the creation of this video the focus shifted more and more to the interior. At first I had another background music from the Dire Straits, but Instagram forced me to change it in order to upload the video. Now this version is more dramatic than the original.
Raphael Heiser / February 2019