I went to the actual restaurant before making this project and the memory of being inside, surrounded by all the lights and decorations, was hugely inspiring!

I wanted to replicate this feeling with my environment. Actually modeling so many lights was a difficult rendering challenge, though, and caused my renders to be decently slow. To help combat this, I used emissive surfaces for the lights in the back and focused on higher detail for only the lights in the front. I also put light sources in the front chili peppers, but linked them only to the chili pepper mesh.

By default, any light sources will hit all objects in the scene. However, with many objects, this can overload the renderer because it will have to calculate the light hitting all these surfaces. So, to speed up render time and help prevent crashes, I linked the light sources for the pepper lights only to the pepper meshes themselves, so ultimately the other objects like the tables, dishes, cups, and napkins, wouldn't have these lights linked to them.

Check out some of the photos I snapped of the restaurant decorations below!