So I’m a big fan of the cute isometric 3D rooms scenes and have been wanting to do one for a long time. So I wracked my brain trying to figure out what I should do first.
I dug through my archives and was pulling a lot of cool 1980’s style rooms and I was almost ready to decide on a specific one to recreate in 3D when I came across a very iconic 1980s bedroom that I instantly realized was the perfect room to model first.
Blanche’s Boudoir from the iconic Golden Girls show.
Now mind you I’ve been working in 3D CGI since the late 90s and the POV-Ray days – back before it even had a GUI and you had to enter everything in a script file and coordinates and plot everything out on graph paper first. So this wasn’t my first rodeo. In fact, over the last couple of decades I’ve worked professionally in 3D Max, Maya, XSI, C4D, Fusion 360 and now Blender. So I’ve done a few things, but I’ve never done “cute”. I do a lot of mechanical and architectural work along with custom product design so the “cute” look WAS going to be new to me.
So I cracked open Google and began looking for some Blender isometric room tutorials in the style I wanted to emulate. I found Tran’s videos on Youtube and instantly knew this was the style I wanted to learn. Her videos are easy to follow and made sense, so thank you Tran for your hard work and making those great tutorials!
Following her tips I was able to make Blanche’s Boudoir in three days working off and on it. I’ve had a few months of puttering around in Blender so I wasn’t starting from scratch.
First I started by blocking out the room in a basic ISO room shape:
Next I realized that Blanche’s room had a little nook around the entrance so I had to make some modifications, but no biggie:
Ok now let’s fill out the room with Blanche’s stuff.
As you can see in the wireframe, I made the meshes high enough resolution so if I ever wanted to 3d print the room I could. The bedspread particularly is super dense to cover all the details in the folds of the “fabric”.
Now let’s add some color! In doing research on the room I ran across some interesting history about the set design. The famous banana leaves that adorn Blanche’s bedspread, walls and curtains are from a wallpaper design was created specifically for the Fountain Coffee Room in the Beverly Hills Hotel and the pattern is called “Martinique”. You can read more about it and Blanche’s room design here and here.
So lovely.
And here is the final design with the banana leaves headboard, wallpaper and curtains:
