Lumen began as a question: if a fragrance were a building, what light would it live in? The project treats the bottle as an architectural object — not a cosmetic one — and uses lighting as the primary narrative device.
Three scents, three times of day. Each frame is lit from a single primary source, controlled in intensity and colour temperature, with the product acting as both subject and sculpture.
The process started not in Blender but on a contact sheet of architectural photography — Chipperfield interiors, Kappo Saito still lifes, Ralph Gibson's early nudes. The bottle needed to carry the same quiet.
Modelled in Blender, rendered in Cycles with adaptive sampling. Materials built from scanned-reference textures — the glass uses a four-layer shader with dispersion and a custom Fresnel curve to match medium-format photography.
Post in DaVinci Resolve: subtle film emulation (Kodak 2383 LUT at 40% opacity), light grain, and a soft halation pass on highlights.