Fruit scene wip

#1

Alright, I’ve been a bit slower than I would’ve liked in getting some progress up, but here’s a recent render.

And the reference:
http://vfxportfolio.com/files/ca3d445/fruitScene_reference.jpg

I’m suddenly wondering about the brightness/contrast of my monitor. It looks absolutely hideous on my laptop. :argh:

Anyway, contrast isn’t quite there yet. And the orange is definitely blown out. I’m using quadratic decay on the key light, so that’s the only object that’s blown out. I’ll either push that light out more or light it separately.
I am at least reasonably satisfied with some of the lighting on the grapes though - although the bounce light might be a little strong on some of the ones towards the front.

Now a question for Jeremy…or anyone, really: How would you go about handling the saturation of the scene through your lighting? This is assuming that for whatever reason you can’t adjust that in post or through materials, just through the lighting. The first scene I tried out I ended up canning because a lot of the fruits were bright, but not very saturated. Even if I could have matched the contrast of the scene, nothing looked at all right while I still had glaring yellow bananas.

#2

OK, yes, the contrast is the main thing to work on, your reference image has very soft, even lighting that wraps all the way around most of the fruit.

If you use quadratic decay on your key light, then make sure the light is a realistic distance away from the fruit, at least 15 feet or so.

Something’s wrong with your shadows, or shadows are missing from some lights. I’m not sure if I can see any shadows on the plate at all. At the base of the pear, the bottom of the pear is black (it shouldn’t be) but the plate underneath it has a bright highlight (which should be shadowed.)

The reference image has nice, bright highlights. See if you can get nice white specular highlights like that, or else position the window object to add a raytraced reflection from that angle. (Or both.)

-jeremy

#3

Okay, here’s an update. I’ve broken most of my lights apart into separate render passes and peiced everything together in post, just because I got sick of wasting my time sitting around waiting for re-renders. But when I went to render, I kinda forgot to put objects in all of the passes I needed them in for mattes. So ignore the blending issues; that’s just a stupid slip-up that won’t be seen in the next one. Same goes for missing reflections. :wink:

Is the contrast at least feeling a little better? Still seems a little too contrasty to me. I’m feeling that that I need a stronger fill (especially on the orange and bananas), and some of the lights are feeling a little too warm… I lit the apple separately in hopes that I might be able to get a closer match to the photo. And though I think it is closer, it still feels…bleh… :shrug:
And I’m really beginning to despise that orange! I lit it separately as well (the key, not the fill), but I’m not getting anything close to what I have in the photo.

#4

Here’s a correctly comp’ed version of the previous one. I also cheated a little and pulled the AO value down in the PSD file (some of the shadows seemed too dark). I’ll do that in the shader itself eventually, but it’s a bit easier to experiment with in ps to get a feel for what I need.
The orange is a little better now…

I also uploaded a PSD with the current breakdown, if you want to tear any of my separate lighting setups apart:
http://www.vfxportfolio.com/files/ca3d445/fruitScene_t03.psd

EDIT:
AO was darkening the scene too much because I did something stupid again. :stuck_out_tongue:
Just put the occlusion pass in the wrong order in the comp - before the fill/rim/etc.
I’ll swap the attachment for another.

#5

Some of the shadows/occlusion under the grapes and such seem too dark, especially for a plate that is reflective. You might raise the grape that’s cutting through the plate too.

-jeremy

#6

Alright, new take. I cut down on both the shadows and occlusion a little bit, toned down the reflectivity on a few objects (they were feeling waaay too shiny) and adjusted the colors in the apple a little bit.
I ended up pushing the blue in the apple a little more with the shader’s “color offset” setting; I just couldn’t manage to get enough blue in the apple just through the lighting, while still keeping the other color values intact. And it only needed a small touch, so hopefully that’s okay.
I spent a lot more time on the bounce lighting, but the changes are really really subtle. I put in a lot of point lights with quadratic decay to simulate color-bleeding just a little bit. Barely noticable. Probably not visible at all in the compressed jpeg. Oh well. :shrug:

#7

It looks like you’re missing some fill light from the upper left (there’s a dark edge there that isn’t on the fruit in the reference) and could still use a little more bounce on the bananas. See if the apple leaf can be more evenly lit too.

In your reference you have real shadows on the cloth with a real shape to them, on the plate you have very faint shadows and then mostly just occlusion. Make sure there isn’t extra fill light hitting the plate that’s washing the shadow out.

The reflections of the left grapes are strangely rim-lit. Maybe there’s extra light in the reflections that you don’t need, or some of your shadows don’t appear in reflections? Anyway try to make the reflections look like what’s being reflected.

-jeremy

#8

Another take. This will probably have to be the final take; I doubt I’ll have time to tweak things, other than maybe a couple small changes on one or two of the passes.
Added an extra fill light to help cut off that dark edge. I think some of it still shows through just a little bit, but it’s a lot better.
Moved the shadow light down a little to get some of the cloth shadow to show through. I also made the shadows a little bit crisper. The shadows were so soft before that I think they almost blended right in with the AO.
Also fixed a little bit of the rim light on the loose grapes.

Admittedly, I kind of screwed up the shadows. I rendered out my shadows as an entirely separate pass, using the standard shadow override of render layers. They work fine (well, the mental ray pass is completely unusable - I had to render it out separately with Maya’s renderer), but they don’t appear in the reflections, since there are no reflections in the override. Didn’t have a chance to fix it, but I don’t think that that’s too terribly noticable…

#9

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