[hyltom]

As i said, i used this lighting setup few month ago, so i was not sure i could remember it exactly...so i tried it again few minutes ago (just by following what i say above)....and i' m not that far.

This is 10mn rendering (SL 13), burn 0.8, gamma 2.2. I just changed the shutter to 7 (not 4) as the product is smaller.

Oh and i forget to mention that there is no postwork and the background looks pretty white

[richardfollett]

Thanks hyltom and to everyone else.. I'm getting there slowly..

[simmsimaging]

Hey Hyltom -
It's a great start, and while it doesn't have postwork to make the background white it also doesn't have the control of contrast/tone shift on the earbuds that the reference photo does.

To match that for style/shape of the earbuds you have to get the fall off of light on those white buds, or on the phone (which you can't really see on that angle anyway), and for that you can't have a blown out white background in the shot - unless you do post work.

I could be wrong but IMO the full finished image cannot be done in one shot without post to either tweak the lighting on the ear buds, or the background, or both. You can get close, but I did not think that was the goal and the differences are pretty key to the overall quality of the image.

You might get a lot closer if your background white plane/curved wall is much further away from the object - it's the way we used to do it before Pshop, but it still wouldn't be quite like the reference IMO.




b

[KurtS]

The reference is clearly a photoshop work (just look how the reflection does not match the object), but it's still very interesting to se if it's possible to achieve this without post...

[hyltom]

Brett, the goal of my explanation was to give some tricks to get a clean and crisp render without postwork. It has not be done to match the exact same lighting than the ipod picture. I'm totally agree with you that the earphone looks much better in the reference "photo", but the overall of this pseudo photo looks really fake to me (it's more a postworked Vray render than a photo).
Concerning my rendering, i have spent few minutes (around 10mn) to setup everything: find the 3d of the ipod, put some earphone, create a floor, add the materials and use the LDR for the lighting...than i click render. So i haven't try very hard to get something looking good. Now if you ask me to get something better without postwork, i really think it can be done, but i will not used the technics that i have explained above.
Maybe this lighting subject could be an interesting challenge... Anyone ready to prepare the scene?

[simmsimaging]

Hey Hyltom -
Please don't take my comment as a criticism - your work is awesome. I just felt it necessary to point out that what you see in the reference is not going to be done with one render because the person posting it could spend a LOT of time trying to get that look and not hit it. Your set up will do something good, but different. I am very used to clients showing me reference and asking for a similar look, but what *exactly* in the shot they are actually reacting to is often hard to tell - so getting "close" can be hard or not good enough because the one little thing that is different might be the part they really liked. For a product shot like this one the clients could very easily be focused on a detail of the earbuds and so you could easily miss the mark for your client without understanding how the lighting was done (or painted in Photoshop )

I agree it looks fake btw - but he asked to match that image, not what I thought of it as a realistic image, and that's part of why I said you would need post to get there.



b

[martgreg]

Hi there this looks great for people that struggle to master this program.. i looked at you information but cant clearly see what teh scene will look like is there any way of showing it a bit clearer showing where you place teh HDR and the ground plane etc..

thanks...

[hyltom]

Ground is located at 0,0,0 its size depend of your product but you can make it as big as you want. The HDR is simply used as an image base lighting, so no special location. The most important is to have a good alignment between your camera, the product and the HDR. To find it, render a chrome sphere first and see how the HDR is positioned...the darkest part reflected in the chrome sphere should face you. After you find the good alignment, simply rotate your product (not the camera) to get the appropriate viewing angle. All this mean, the camera have a fix position in relation to the HDR. Also i forget to mention that the product should be located at the origine 0,0.

[martgreg]

ahh i think i get it.. i will try it soon....




thanks


btw your floor material is great

thanks hyltom

[mrcz]

Thanks Hyltom.
Simple and very usefull setup.
See my attempt below.



Martin

[hyltom]

Thanks Martin, this lighting setup is really efficient. The only problem is that the lighting is fix, it's the main reason why i don't used it anymore. In my attempt to get even better result, i found that the multilight feature is really amazing. Now my scene are composed of multi mxi light and i simply turn on or off the one that i want. So to go further i would suggest to used the same principle than the LDR but with some geometry and add few other light around the product. Then used the multilight feature to control the lighting. The render time will not be longer, the noise will even clear faster. And as i said in my first post, the most important detail is certainly the floor material. It give some very good result whatever the scene you are using. By the way, you can modify the roughness if you want to get some sharper reflection.

[yanada]

Thank U Sir

[mverta]

Hyltom -

Regarding your floor material:

Layer 2, with its roughness at 99, means that the reflectance 90 parameter is having next to no effect, and neither is nd. So having your reflectance 90 less than 255 isn't doing anything for the material, and you might as well leave the nd at 3.0 - it isn't doing anything either. Additionally, you might actually benefit, noise-wise, from having slightly brighter reflectance 0 for layer 2, with slightly less weightmap value. So again, for layer 2, leave your nd at 3 and the reflectance 90 at 255.

Layer 1, because the roughness is low (10) is indeed being affected by nd and Reflectances, so in this case, having custom values for both makes sense, though you left the nd at 3, which is fine.

_Mike

[martgreg]

isi t relative because teh back is so burned out ?

or do i need to change some settings

the curve going from left to right and up is white shiny plastic.. default material and the curve going up from the ground plane to the left is dark gray shiny plastic


any help would be great ...


btw i dont know if i set it up right

i added teh hdr kindly provided by hyltom into the environments settings and COPIED TO ALL.. is this correct

[hyltom]

Thanks Mike, i will definitely change all these and give it a try.

MartGreg, I'm not sure what's your problem...is that coming from the shiny white part that doesn't look as you want? First, maybe it's because of the material...Second it's looking grey because this part is not light up...it's why i suggest to move from the LDR to a scene base on real geometry with many light that you can control...also, you could switch the LDR to have the lighting coming from the right. Anyway, i already render many white (matte or shiny) product on a burnout background and it looks pretty good....but for sure, it's not the easiest thing to do.

Here is one (without postwork)