Need a little help rendering silver ring

#1

Hello everyone!

I desperately need some help rendering out some jewelry - more specifically a silver ring. I am trying to render it out with 3DS MAX using vray 1.5. I have tried almost everything, various studio lighting setups, various HDRI images and other systems, yet the result seems to be terrible. These are my attempts so far:

First test with just reflections.

Two attempts with vray sun and a few vray lights. The silver material is supposed to be glossy, but seems to be absolutely matte.

The last attempt seems to be the most realistic to me, but when trying out different angles it does not look good at all. My main problem is that the silver material itself is quite matte and does not seem to reflect the way I would want.

Could anyone please help me out with this and perhaps give me a few tips on how to get those nice reflections on the small shiny surface of a ring. Thank you.

#2

I think the main issue is you need a more exciting background to reflect in the silver ring. Also you might want to add a little bump to the surface to pick up more reflections. Also, you may wish to make the ring a little greyer or the background a little darker (probably with a gradient), anything to get some contrast that causes the ring to separate from the background.

Check this out…

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/flat_metallic_surfaces/flat_metallic_surfaces.htm

And this…

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/chrome/chrome.htm

Hopefully something in there will help.

  • Neil
#3

don’t use hard edges on the ring andwhere. use really narrow bevels so that light can glint off the edges of the ring. v-ray might have a shader to do this automatically (mental ray does).

use way more lights. think of a jewelry case in tiffany’s. hundreds of lights. and it’s not that the lights are bright so much as they are actually physically visible in the reflections–so turn on reflection visibility or use bright white disks (geometry) as practicals (visible lights).

use an exciting background. one with great contrast (a flat histogram) works best. if you want it to look silvery, use something with grey contrast (a histogram with a big bump in the middle).

add glow. glow sells bright light reflections.

make sure your diamond is the right size, or choose an index of refraction so that refractions actually occur. this is the number one problem with CG gems. test the gem by using a single light scene, and see if you can get the number of apparent reflections (actually refractions) to multiply as you change the index of refraction.

#4

there are enough black spots in the gem to suggest that you have picked a bad index of refraction. alternatively, if you’re set on using diamond refraction (2.42), scale the gem along the y axis until you see refractions.

#5

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