Behind The Scenes: Central Perk (Patreon)

Happy new year! It's my first project of 2022 and of course, it's a little bit of pressure. No matter how hard I try to convince myself it's business as usual, my mind just won't let go. For some reason, the first project of the new year has to be great, has to be something new and special. 

Well it's hard to produce something special on demand. In my book, consistency is the king, so I try to tone these urges down. But that doesn't mean I didn't try to do my best. But it was challenging to come up with suitable topic. This time I didn't have anything I was really looking forward to make more than anything else. I had good candidates, but none that popped out. 

So I just wanted to make something comfortable, something soothing. Something to touch base with and press the reset button. 

When it comes to TV shows, Friends represent just that. When we're bored at home and can't decide on what to watch, we default to Friends. It's soothing and friendly :) And same as we touch base with the TV show, the characters touch base in their local café, no matter how bad their day was.

That's why I picked the Central Perk location for the first project of the 2022.

Visit the full Pinboard here

It's not the first time I attempted to do the Central Perk diorama. If you look into the Pinboard, one of the references is my old low poly diorama. I didn't like how that one came out. All that time I thought I messed up the lighting. But now when I inspected it, it was obvious that layout is off as well. Some proportions too, but mostly the overall composition. It was too messy, everything screamed for attention.

So I gathered more references and tried to come up with the better solution. I even included the Lego version (We have one at home so I literally put it on the table next to me). It occurred to me, that all the references and versions I liked, were only capturing the café partially. Even though Lego version is the full Central Perk layout. it's simplified and asorted.

So I picked up the mechanical pencil and started to work on some rough layout. At this stage, I'm just trying to determine floorplan, composition and scale of the objects. Additionally I picked a different view than before. 

Even though the bar section is interesting and iconical, I think it was the main source of the scale mismatch and busy layout. I switched the script and included only the entrance and sitting section.

Still too busy, so I compressed the composition and left out several tables and furniture pieces. Finally I had something pleasing to look at. I refined the sketch with some details I wanted to make sure to include and fired up the one and only Blender.

You can watch the process video on Youtube