I think it took me roughly a month to finish this section. At first, I decided to go with a wine cellar, but soon I realized that it is not a good option as it has no windows. So, after I watched all lectures I decided to redo all the scene.
My goal was to create a very basic building that I could test all my knowledge from the lectures. So, I drew these simple sketches:
Here are all screenshots of my progress that I think is worth to share.
An initial scene:
Filling the scene with basic objects:
The initial indoor view:
Added the Filmic filter, HDR, and denoising; I also changed most of the materials for the Principled shader:
Added basic stairs and the second floor:
Added brick patterns on top and bottom of the windows; here they are made with meshes:
The same pattern on top and bottom of windows, but baked into a texture:
Here I tested the scene in Unity:
Same but with textures. You may notice some artifacts on the first screenshot; it is because I baked the texture with low resolution (2k instead of 4k):
The final scene:
And the volumetric light:
