[big K]

hi max,

great work so far !

one thing i have to say (and it was also topic on your photo forum sidestep)
is about the background.
this "dull" (don´t take me wrong) grey might get some little coloring up (only little) and some kind of texture (a slight fabric texture perhaps) that looks uniform from the far distance but on closeups gives this little extra detail.
and i don´t know is the mat lambertian ? if yes i would add use a very high roughness value instead. maybe this is also an improvement.

just thinking loud here
keep on going !

michael

[Maximus3D]

BigK: Hi and thank you

The background will have textures and different colors, i will also redo the clothsim for that as the current one has too few folds to look interesting. I have gathered resources from a couple of local photoequipment stores in the city and also catalog material and webresources so i know what the cloth should look like. And i'll recreate some of the most common colors and patterns used for them. It's on my tasklist.

Btw, it's currently only lambertian as you said. I appreciate the loud thoughts, there might be something i missed that you guys can see.

/ Max

[caryjames]

Hi Max- Thanks for replying!

As I use Rhino it would be good to have them converted, maybe when you get ready to sell them you can find someone who can convert the files from your apps to Rhino .

I know that a lot of "jewellers" use the light tent for their product shots. However, the live photography that I have seen from these kits and setups is seldom very good. The lighting is definitely uniform and diffused but the diamonds don't "pop" --you don't get much dispersion. It seems like these kits with the light tents with holes cut out are being used mostly for jewellers getting photographs for their internal purposes- not catalogue shots. I could be wrong though

The catalogue shots seem to be taken with proper studio equipment like you have been modeling!! Unfortunately a lot of the real jewellery photographers also use diffusers in front of their softboxes and as you know this is almost impossible to do with Maxwell with computers today.

Thanks again for answering my questions

[Maximus3D]

No problem Cary, thanks to you too

Yes i agree, porting them to Rhino would be good. But i fear the many issues that goes with such a conversion such as possible extra triangulation added to the current triangulation of the models. Scaleissues i mentioned earlier, How well the obj importer works in Rhino and many many more obstacles.

Any chance you could show me some typical jewelryshots using tents and in normal photostudios ? i'd like to see the differences myself.

Dispersion in a tent should be possible, especially if you have one with openings in it like mine does. Then it just depends on what type of lightsource you use. I've seen those devices which uses fiberoptics to focus the light very well on the gems, it's something i'm gonna build and run some testrenders with as soon as it's done. I trust your comments Cary, since you been working with jewelrystuff for quite some time you most likely know more about it then i do so i value your input.

Diffusers infront of the softboxes is another major hurdle i need to find a way around with too, this is a issue with both Maxwell and Fryrender. I'll see what i can do about that..

/ Max

[caryjames]

Thanks Maximus! The store that I do a lot of work for hired out a professional photographer to shoot some of my work. This was a couple of years ago, I need to try and get hold of the images for my portfolio so if I do I will send them to you.

I actually went to the shoot and basically the photographer had a studio that was blacked out in a warehouse typed building. He then used large softboxes and diffusers with white and black bounce cards.

I will see what else I can dig up, because I do have some shots created in similar setup to the light box. In the real world I have actually taken some shots of one of my watches using a translucent file storage box as a diffuser.

This is a shot I took using that file box ($5) and then lighting through the box from the outside with 2 halogen lights from Walmart ($7 each). I suspect that lighting through SSS might give the NL guys a seizure

[Maximus3D]

Thanks for the image Cary, it has some info in it i can extract and use in my tests for this type of setup. Heh, your setup is defintely cheap, but it works pretty well except that i'm missing some reflections on the glass surface of the watch. Hehe light through sss is a nightmare, i won't go down that road wit this setup. It would make it impossible to use with unrealistic rendertimes for both engines. It might be something i wanna do for the studiosetup in Modo 401 as it will have a superfast sss solution.

/ Max

[caryjames]

Hey Maximus- no sweat- the watch crystal is a 3.5mm thick piece of domed synthetic sapphire with an anti reflective coating on it .

I will have to check out Modo 401!

[Maximus3D]

That sounds like a pretty expensive watch Cary the anti-reflective coating definately explains the lack of reflections on the glass. That i didn't think of until you mentioned it.

Yea you go ahead and take a closer look at 401, it will be a great piece of software! and as it now will support dispersion it would be useful to you as you render out lotsa gemstones in your line of work. It's easy to model with, you would have no problem learning Modo.

/ Max

[caryjames]

Thanks Max- I will definitely check out Modo- thanks for the tip

[simmsimaging]

You do not really need a 'diffuser' for lighting Maxwell. The function they serve photographically is to make a larger light source, so you can get the same basic effect with a larger emitter.

The only other significant difference is gradation across the surface of the light (hotspot and dark edges etc.) but you can achieve that with some custom maps as emitter surfaces. HDR is best, but even 8bit images will help give you falloff in the highlights like real lighting.

In any case, there is no need or reason to shoot "through" a diffuser in Max to get the same sort of light quality that you get from doing that in a photo studio. It's not exact, but what part of CG really is?

b

[Maximus3D]

Brett: Oh ok so that's the function the diffusers have. That's great to know, thanks so much for the explanation. True that this won't be 100% exactly like the real thing in a real studio, to get rendertimes a normal human can survive emitters can be added on the larger surfaces instead of having small emitters shine through the larger cloths diffusing the light and generating huge amounts of noise on the way through the cloth onto the subject. but as you probably see i'm building this so it can also be used accurately, meaning that you can emit lihgt from the spots and through the cloth or off the reflective surfaces if you use a biased engine like Vray or Modo or something like that. Let's say it's built to be futureproof.

It been a while since i worked on this, other things got in the way.. and i wanted a break so i didn't get tired of it before it was finished. But now i'm back to burn rubber again with more new props, renders and other related studiostuff.

To start it off again, here's a Elinchrom Ringflash i built tonight.



A referencephotos of the real thing


/ Max

[frosty_ramen]

So Magnus what is the asking price of your complete set??

Dan

[Maximus3D]

That's a good question Dan, i'm afraid i cannot answer your question now because it depends on so many variables where one of them are how complete this studiosetup will be. Which means how many props the final version will include, and when all is done i have to find some reasonable sum that fits most people with a interest in this and that compensates for the large amount of work put into it all. But i can say this much.. it will be more than $1.

/ Max

[Maximus3D]

Two testrenders with the ringflash which i finally got to work, except for a odd artifact it creates. I get these 'blocks' in the image when it renders. Reminds me of buckets in a normal biased renderengine. Never seen this weird artifact before and it only happens when i use the ringflash to lit my scene with.




But.. besides this annoying artifact, the fact remains. This ringflash actually works! it reduces the amount of shadow you get on your subject when you shoot with it. Which is as far as i understand exactly what a real ringflash does too. so from that point of view i'm quite satisfied with it.

/ Max

[yanada]

cool tests Max I'm also interested to purchase some of them But the need to be .lwo, let me know when you ready