Lighting Challenge #4: Bottle Collection

[Mike_RB]

Same setup, another angle.

[lazzhar]

Hi, I’m impressed with your works guys !!
Here is my update :

[jorust]

I like the last one Mike RB.

Not only because of the cool angle but for the beautiful light.
It’s as if there’s windows above the bottles, like a skylight or winter garden.
Nice.

[Mike_RB]

Thanks, here is same setup with the hdr rotated to make more sense with the window. Both about 10 minute renders.

[ACamacho]

Really nice Mike RB! Expecially the bottom one…glass is great. One suggestion would be maybe to add a stronger reflection on the windows like the one you posted a few messages above. Maybe also brighten up the background a bit but that’s minor. Very nice!

[Mike_RB]

Thanks! To be honest I’m really not doing much here. I haven’t even really played with “lighting” this scene at all. All that is going on here is 3 glass surfaces with different absorption depths and colors, and a few basic surfaces for everything else. The rest is driven by the HDR, both for lighting (irradiance caching) and reflections. Modo 201 makes this type of scene really fast to setup.

[CaptainObvious]

Your scene is coming along well. I think I recognize the problem with the refraction there: it appears to be missing the “exit” refraction in the back-faces. If you have a glass-like IOR (like 1.4-ish) but the orangina bottle on the right is turning into such a powerful magnifying glass as if the whole thing were a solid lens, then the problem is probably that the surface is refracting as if it is single sided, and not doing the refraction back out into air at the first inner wall of the bottle.

-jeremy

Yes, I agree. You need air polygons. Check out this tutorial.

Thanks, here is same setup with the hdr rotated to make more sense with the window. Both about 10 minute renders.

http://www.elementvfx.com/WebDemo/bot5a.jpg
http://www.elementvfx.com/WebDemo/bot5b.jpg

Ten minutes!?! What kind of hardware are you running? I can’t wait to get my hands on 201. The raytracing is beautiful. There has been a severe lack of complex raytracing action in the friday updates, but I think this proves 201 handles it quite well indeed.

[jeremybirn]

Yes, I agree. You need air polygons. Check out this tutorial.

slatr himself posted a link to that tutorial on the 2nd page, so I know he’s seen it.

I was telling him that in most renderers, you don’t need to make copies of the surfaces in order for them to render double-sided and refract the rays back to air. I guess Lightwave users may need to cut some of the geometry in places if they really need to make back-faces with the opposite IOR out of these models. In most of these models the outside just loops around to become the inside surface, so it seems as if you’d be changing that if you followed that tutorial…

-jeremy

[Mike_RB]

amd x2 4400, rendering with 2 threads.

[Insider]

Hi Jeremy! Nice idea for a challenge.
More modo… a lot of surfacing issues, a few bottles no complete, but…

The windows are just off-white luminous polys, GI turned on, and one
reflector. Backdrop is just a two color gradient. No other lights in the scene.

[Mike_RB]

Nice Dan! What was your setup time?

here is another angle of the same setup:

[Insider]

Setup? Honestly, about 10 minutes for the lighting.
I spent over an hour screwing with surfaces

Render is about 15m on a Macbook Pro.

How about you? Great looking glass, btw. I like the marble-like window ledge!

[Insider]

Here’s one more, just a different angle, slight DOF.

[jeremybirn]

I’ve been working on glassy looks and setting up an outdoor scene. This is with with stock Maya shaders, mostly PhongE, and rendered in MR.

Tonight I’m going to try putting some caustics in there, and maybe render it in passes so I can play with the fill light levels in post a bit.

-jeremy

[CaptainObvious]

slatr himself posted a link to that tutorial on the 2nd page, so I know he’s seen it.

Oh.

I was telling him that in most renderers, you don’t need to make copies of the surfaces in order for them to render double-sided and refract the rays back to air. I guess Lightwave users may need to cut some of the geometry in places if they really need to make back-faces with the opposite IOR out of these models. In most of these models the outside just loops around to become the inside surface, so it seems as if you’d be changing that if you followed that tutorial…

Whether or not the outside and the inside are a part of the same continuous mesh doesn’t generally matter. As long as there are no smoothing errors or such, it’s usually just the matter of pasting a flipped copy. I didn’t have any problems with the items in this scene doing that. Well, I did have problems with one of the bottles, so I ended up rebuilding it to make the geometry cleaner. And at the end, I removed the air polys completely, since Kray doesn’t need them.

[Mike_RB]

[lazzhar]

Another render that toke 1h 15 min:

[jeremybirn]

Lazhar -

I like the concept and the execution!

I wonder if the impression of a central light illuminating everything would be boosted by having more of a gradient in the background, brighter in the center and darker at the edges, or with more directional shadows radiating out and dominating the background?

-jeremy

[jeremybirn]

I added a caustic pass, it didn’t take long to render and seems to add alot to the glassy look, especially for trying to make glass in direct sun.

-jeremy

[jorust]

Hi Jeremy. The last one is nice. You’re right about the caustic. Nice effect with the sunlight. I would like to see some of the bottles more transparent. I think some of them could be less diffuse/metallic/shiny.

Anyway. Here’s my last one I guess. Nore color and less DOF.