Blender Bathroom
Renovating a bathroom. First in Blender.
My parents wanted to renovate the bathroom.
There were ideas, examples and preferences, but no clear shared picture yet. And that is exactly the tricky thing about spaces. Everyone thinks they are imagining the same thing, until you keep talking.
Then it turns out the cabinet is on the left for one person, the shower is bigger for another and the slanted ceiling suddenly becomes very cooperative in someone’s head.
You can make a floor plan. Or build something in The Sims.
I opened Blender.
The space did not cooperate
The bathroom has a slanted ceiling and a specific angled corner. Nothing too dramatic, just enough to make standard tools annoying.
I tried a few online tools, but ran into their limits pretty quickly. The room became slightly too straight, furniture was tied to default options and materials could only be adjusted so much.
For a quick sketch, that is fine.
This just was not a space where “roughly” felt very useful.
The slanted ceiling, the height and the angle are exactly what determine whether a layout will feel logical later. A cabinet can fit perfectly on paper and still feel too large in real life. A walking route can work on a floor plan and still feel tight in the actual room.
In Blender, I could recreate the bathroom down to the centimeter, place furniture freely, adjust materials and keep tweaking until the model did what I needed.
More work, but far less concessions.
Measure first. Make it pretty later.
It started with the basics.
Length, width, height, the slanted ceiling and the angled corner the online tools could not really handle. Then I rebuilt the bathroom in Blender. First just the room itself, without furniture, tiles or atmosphere.
Not exactly the most spectacular part to show.
But it is the part that determines everything that comes after.
If the base is wrong, a beautiful render does not mean much. It mostly makes the wrong idea more convincing. And a convincing wrong idea is fairly dangerous once tiles, plumbing and an invoice get involved.
So the room had to be right first.
Furniture at real scale
Once the base was in place, I could start testing layouts and proportions.
For the furniture, I used 3D models from IKEA. Through the IKEA API, I could download them and use them in Blender. The models are already built to scale, so I did not have to guess whether something would fit.
Just place it and see what happens.
For smaller details, I also used existing 3D models. Not every bottle, plant or bathroom accessory needed to be made from scratch.
Even I draw the line somewhere.
The value was in the room as a whole: how the cabinet relates to the rest of the space, how much room is left, how the layout feels and what happens to the atmosphere when materials change.
It was not about a shampoo bottle sitting in a corner.
Although secretly, a bottle like that does help make a bathroom feel less like an empty box with a sink.
It did not stay a quick render
Once the layout was there, I could have stopped at a few images.
But a space only really starts to feel real when the materials work, the lighting is right and there is a bit of life in it. So I added tiles, lighting, plants, details in the niche and bottles on the edge.
Then, of course, I also wanted to make a walkthrough.
For a bathroom concept at home, it may have been a little bit overkill.
But once you started...
Finally, the same picture in our heads
The end result was not a final interior design.
It was a way to talk about the bathroom without everyone translating the same floor plan into a different 3D version in their head.
That made the conversation much more concrete. We could point to what worked, what felt tight, which atmosphere fit better and which choices were still open.
That is why this project fits between my other work. It started at home, but the approach is just as familiar in website projects: making a vague idea tangible, exposing constraints and building something people can actually respond to.
In this case, that just happened to be a bathroom.
With a slightly overdeveloped approach.
Technology
Blender · 3D modeling · IKEA API · 3D assets · animation · rendering