19 Dec 2018 – Staff Restaurant servery

Staff Restaurant servery showing the drinking water sinks.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas and the venue for my annual CGI Christmas scene for Facebook is of course the Staff Restaurant.

The main things missing from the interior are the glass/metal ‘screens’ separating the main dining hall from the kitchens and the toilets/stair lobby.  I am going to use the original 1960s features rather than those from the mid 90s or c2000 refurbishments.

Following about a few hours of work, I have almost finished these now and I am satisfied with the level of detail and accuracy as I have good photos and decent elevation and section drawings to work from. Unlike the external windows, these should not need level of detail improvements. Some of the dimensions are unreadable (due to the resolution of the drawings) and also in imperial units so there is a little guesswork/artistic licence – may be a few cm out of place. The doors’ width is not as accurate as I would like but these things can be tweaked if necessary.

The screen separating the restaurant from the kitchens is a lot more complex than the one by the stairs – it has five doors, with three different types/width. The two at the far ends are narrower than the others and the centre one has a handle – for some reason, the other two do not. The two each side of the centre one can open 180 degrees. 

Staff Restaurant servery
Staff Restaurant servery
The servery c 1994

There are also two built-in drinking water dispensers either side of the middle door (a tap and a sink with shelving above for glasses/cups I think). 

Staff Restaurant servery showing the drinking water sinks.
Staff Restaurant servery showing the drinking water sinks.

At the top are vertical glass louvres and while I am happy with the design detail of these, I need to establish the spacing. The metal frame appears to be aluminium and I have assigned an aluminium material from the metal material library mentioned in a previous post – looks good and I have assigned stainless steel for the sink and taps. The glass material is much too dark so will need tweaking.

The second ‘screen’ separates the main restaurant area from the lobby containing the stairs to the subway and toilets. This is much simpler than the servery and I have been able to reuse many of the metal frame components from the servery.

Next steps

  • Complete the servery screen then install it into the main Restaurant model.
  • Add curtains to the kitchen side of the servery screen. I have some older curtains from previous work that I may be able to use. I am working on redrawing the pattern from the orange/brown curtains but that may not be finished in time for Christmas so I will either look for something similar online or add a festive texture like I have done with previous scenes.
  • Add the Christmas stuff! I thought it would be easy to find this but after several hours spent searching for suitable free Christmas tree models on various stock model sites, I decided to purchase one (about $10). It needed a few tweaks to make it ready to use in Blender (making the baubles etc linked so editing one edits them all) but it is great now and nice and detailed! My shiny metal textures look great on this.
  • I was hoping to find a model of Santa’s sleigh but again didn’t have much luck so I am just going to use the tree.
  • I’m looking for a 1960s or 70s Christmas greeting banner but again, I might need to make this myself. I’m looking into suitable fonts but any suggestions are welcome!

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