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Ray tracing of metal parts

9 REPLIES 9
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Message 1 of 10
philqpr
1213 Views, 9 Replies

Ray tracing of metal parts

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

 

9 REPLIES 9
Message 2 of 10
llamas91
in reply to: philqpr

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.

 

 

Message 3 of 10
philqpr
in reply to: philqpr

Thank you for the reply and comments, I will keep on playing with the settings and environments.

Message 4 of 10

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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Message 5 of 10
cikho
in reply to: llamas91

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? Smiley Very Happy

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almost a showcase PRO user 😛

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Message 6 of 10

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

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Message 7 of 10
MarionLandry
in reply to: philqpr

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.

Brushed Metal.png

 

As a comparison, the same scene and settings with a Chrome metal

chrome.png

 

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.  

triplanar.png

 

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:

ray tracing setting.png

 

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. 

movelight.png

 

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:

psd.png

 

Message 8 of 10
philqpr
in reply to: philqpr

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.

Message 9 of 10
MarionLandry
in reply to: philqpr

They are not difficult, it just depends what you are after. Showcase has amazing quality metals available. But when it's time to customize the look of any materials, it opens the door to lots of possibility and therefore, lots of testing until you get what you need. Good luck.
Message 10 of 10
llamas91
in reply to: MarionLandry

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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