Ok so a very stereotypical and not the most thrilling of scenes but it’s a learning exercise and I’m a little baffled here in trying to achieve the look I want.
Edit: Having got things into a better place, I’m still struggling with that classic bottle look of having the middle lit and edges darkened. Is this a refraction issue or should I re-think my lighting?
Ok, so turning to a more real world lighting setup for this, I put one large backlight behind the bottle in order to light the middle and darken the edges.
While this gets it into the right ball park, the issue that arises is that it only works with the light visible, making it seemingly impossible to have a background (and screws up the reflection on the water).
If I turn the light to invisible the whole things goes dark, presumably because it was refracting the light itself. Setting the override environment features to white doesn’t work either as it looks washed out.
Am I missing something here? I’d expect simply turning the light to invisible to do what I need but perhaps there is more to it?
Hi Paul,
You will need the light behind to be visible in refractions to get the nice effect. So making the light invisible I believe disables it from refractions.
However it is not really necessary to use a light to create the effect. You could use a piece of geometry with incandescence behind to create the nice light refracting in the bottle and set that geometry’s primary visibility off, along with cast/receive shadows if you have other lights around in the scene, keeping it visible in refractions (and reflections if necessary)
Give that a try.
Richard
Hey Richard, thanks for the tip! Using a self illuminating card wasn’t something I’d thought of! Not sure how they do the official pack shots as trying to achieve the perfect look entirely via render without retouching is kind of tough. But good learning experience.
When you say “not sure how they do the official pack shots” who do you mean? Heineken or companies in general? Who says they do it in one shot?
Getting it in one is definitely not straight forward as always time consuming to do. Lots of render stat overides, rayswitches etc.
It is whether you want to spend that time in 3d or in post. I personally think it is a hell of a lot quicker to address in post. So we will render separate light sources and piece them together in photoshop. It depends on how complex the bottle is and the scene I guess.
Even in photography it will not necessarily be done in one shot. We have retouched many bottle shots where the photographer has photographed separate light elements and not captured it all in one.
Rich
You’re right. Absolutely. This was a challenge to learn more VRay and try to get as close as possible to the kind of product shots you see for drinks companies (Heineken in this place), which has ended up feeling pretty far away from that (although at least in the right ball park).
Fun but devilishly tricky to get that perfect setup to require minimal retouching.
I think green background is also a bit to “blame” here. Try to use Vray material override on that green background, make nice white mat and plug it into GI, reflection, refraction…slots.
Not sure if it will work but i would try to see if that helps a bit.