My aim is to create still images of a mechanical assembly, I am currently looking at an assembly where good quality photographs have already been taken. I am not trying to recreate exactly the same images but produce good quality stills from Showcase and gain an understanding of the best settings to use in Showcase for natural finished metal parts. I am trying to get an idea for the best way to mimic lighting and material reflection & shine as per attached camera shot image.
The attached word document shows an image taken using a camera, and a couple of images I created in Showcase.
The first showcase image created from ray tracing using white room environment, objects baked prior to ray tracing, I left the ray tracing to run for around 30 minutes
Thanks
Autodesk Showcase 2014
Windows 7 64 bit,
NVIDIA Quadro 2000
MEtal always seems to be the hardest thing to render and make it look realistic or close to it.
What i have learned from dabblying with the settings is. It helps alot to change reflection settings, as well as manupulating the color of the metal. Also, using a different light angle can improve the color as well.
Metal appearance depends of the light and environment.
Try to choose the environment before to modify the material properties.
White room is not the perfect environment for mech and metals, because it has a flat lighting image for reflections.
Try for example id hardwood. maybe it is better, with some light adjustment.
Then, in your rendered image, i think that if you put an accent light (spot) that illuminate the internal plates, maybe they result less black.
As said by llamas91, "Metal always seems to be the hardest thing to render..."
Bye
Christian Garimberti
Technical Manager and Visualization Enthusiast
Qs Informatica S.r.l. | Qs Infor S.r.l. | My Website
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MEtal always seems to be the hardest thing to render and make it look realistic or close to it.
you did not try to render realistic luminous object, didn't you?
Showcase does not have real luminous objects. you can do this with a combination of features....
read this.... http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/General/Image-with-light/m-p/4490933/highlight/true#M1388
But .... In mechanical rendering, luminous objets are very rare, so normally is not an issue.... instead mechanical assemblies are always made of metallic parts!
To customize materials
Watch these videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flxxxUCuVGA&index=42&list=PLD6D46E8F19539A17
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkED6Ujp_NE&index=41&list=PLD6D46E8F19539A17
Showcase is a rendering software, but it is optimized for REAL TIME rendering. So i think some features are not so important. Maybe in the future release, with faster hardwares.......
Christian Garimberti
Technical Manager and Visualization Enthusiast
Qs Informatica S.r.l. | Qs Infor S.r.l. | My Website
Facebook | Instagram | Youtube | LinkedIn
HI,
I feel I am a bit late replying to this post and I appologize for the delay.
Thanks for sending the image reference, it really helps to understand your challenge.
Metals are all about reflections.. so you will definitly benefit from trying different type of environment but I would strongly suggest you create your own custom environment from an HDRI image that will give you the reflection that you are after. From looking at the original images, I can see some baby blues and light pink. No elements are identifiable in the reflection so that mean you would need a blurry type of refelction image. There is a wealth of free HDRI images available on the web. You can find one with the colour you need and blur it in Photoshop.
Maybe a good place to start is with the ID Bloom Environment. This will provide soft blurry reflection to your metal piece.
As a test, I have created a similar (really quick) object that you have, Applied a SHowcase Brushed Metal materials and rendered using Ray traced.
As a comparison, the same scene and settings with a Chrome metal
You will probably have to adjust the settings of the metal you choose to really suit your need by perhaps using an image in the materials instead of a colour.
Start with a Showcase material metal and instead of using a colour, chose a texuture image.
If you use an image projection, make sure to use the Triplanar type projection and to move/scale and rotate the image your to fit on your properly on your object.
Keep in mind that:
Metal materials look way more realistic with Ray tracing as you will get real reflection not only from the environment but from the objects itself.
I will suggest that you DO NOT bake the ambiant Shadow as this is a "mimicing" technique. Instead, let the Ray tracer calculate a real ambient shadow.
Change that setting under the advanced panel of the ray tracing settings:
You can also modify the orientation and position of the light to fall in your object and create the shadow where you want them. ( i did that for my scene)
If you position the light and shadow where you want them, you most likely won't have to add any additional accent light which simplifies the workflow. You might want to consider adding accent light.. but for such a small object, I would not personally consider it.
Also, if you are planning to use this image for brochure, you might want to save your image as a psd file so you can replace the background image by a white sheet. This is the final render in Photoshop:
Thank you all for the comments, been a great help.
Cheers Marion for your thread, I will test out your advice, I naively thought metals would be easy to reproduce.
Like Marion said, Showcase is an amazing and yet simple program to use. Sometimes it doesnt have everything you need but thats where you gotta spend a little more time and effort into manipulating the materials.
Also, thank you for the tutorial Marion! Im sure everyone here will appreciate it.
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