While building out the initial environment for Fairy Play, I wanted to make sure that the scene's textures really felt like a dollhouse. I used photo references of a dollhouse to fine-tune the shaders before adding in any texture maps (except for the stickers of portraits on the walls).
Photos of Barbie dollhouse hinges for reference
My initial tests included Subsurface scatter on the ceiling and walls to make the space feel like light was passing through. Unfortunately, this introduced a lot of noise and significantly increased the render time.
Initial Diffuse AOV
Initial Subsurface Scatter AOV
Initial Specular AOV
I tested compensating for the longer render times by lowering the ray depth, but the diffuse ray depth was crucial for bouncing the purple light of the ceiling onto the ballroom. Reducing it made the ballroom both darker and more muted. Lowering the ray depth also only reduced render times by about 17%.
Diffuse Ray Depth 4
Diffuse Ray Depth 3
Ultimately, I used subsurface scatter selectively for smaller objects to help make them feel like thin plastic, while removing subsurface scatter from the larger structure. The subsurface scatter still requires denoising, but it significantly improved the render time to isolate it to these objects.
Beauty Layer
Diffuse Layer
Subsurface Scatter Layer
Specular layer
Next Steps
-Texture map tests for the ballroom
-Texture map tests for the toy soldier's different "looks" throughout the film