@Gnot Even
It is gratifying for that to be noticed!
To be fair, I didn’t make them from scratch. But all of the sets in this episode (and in basically all of them) required many hours of work, both to…

Fix the piles of things usually wrong with them, like

And customize them for my needs, including things like:

“Hero props” being things you see up close and are important, like the mirror in this picture, which was in the original environment, but I had to edit and retexture. Specifically it just had a glossy metallic shader with zero roughness, so it just looked like a portal into another mirror image room. I had to fiddle around with “grunge textures” and material nodes to get the look of a mirror that is reasonably clean, but also old, so you can tell she is looking at her reflection in a piece of glass instead of just a perfect duplicate of herself.

Another example of “hero props” would be the wine bottle and wine glasses. I didn’t make the glasses, but in addition to cleaning up the original meshes and materials, I had to make a dynamic system using booleans to make wine that would conform to the inside of the glass/bottle, stay level no matter how the glass was held, AND have adjustable level. Then I had to rig it so it could be parented to either of a character’s hands, OR to a moveable root on the table, with the ability to swap between those as needed. (Oh, and the bottle has different labels that can be swapped on the fly too! Because they drink different wines in different scenes, as per the dialogue)

Actually, each character’s meal is its own entire rigged “character”, with that same sort of switchable parenting for glass, plate, and fork, different stages of the meal being eaten and level of dirtiness that I can swap out, moveable napkin and plate, and so on and so on. All done by me, in addition to all of the fiddling with the meshes I needed to, even though I didn’t make them from scratch.

This all also takes a lot longer if you want to make things WELL, so that you can reuse them in future, in a way that will save you time in the long term, and make your workflow using them much smoother, even if it takes more time to set them up initially.

So yeah…that’s a big part of why this episode took so damn long. I’d estimate I spent at least 10 hours on the bathroom alone, minimum. And at least as much on the meals. And so on. Though it’s hard to tell, because I bounced around a lot, and had to revisit things when I found things that weren’t as I needed them to be.

Phew…that was a huge info dump. Let’s just say I’m excited, and you made my day by noticing. :D

Y’know, it just occurred to me the incredible amount of effort Stellarator must have expended to create all these scenes for this episode - we have a foyer, a living room, a dining room, this room, and a hall connecting to the dining room - and they all have a huge amount of detail (including the new faux antique crackle finish on the sink). The story takes your attention so much you don’t really appreciate the settings until you see a scene with the words removed.