Cineversity

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rizon/5473171665/lightbox/
Is there recommended tutorials I could take that would make my objects like that?
I can sort of do it, but it could be better.
Thanks.

Hi Jamestown,

There is no tutorial to my knowledge. It has certain two main parts to get this aesthetic established: Light and material. (I exclude the orange/yellow illuminated material here, as well the acrylic).

Material
I would explore two ways to get the dark anthracite material, one way is to got with blurred reflections. The other one with animated noise and “sub-frame motion blur”. Both methods are not very fast render-option, and the latter one is for stills only.

In the material channel “reflection”, you find a “blurriness” parameter, with some other parameter. This would be the simplest way. As I know that some artists will not happy with this, I developed another method.

You set the reflection for the material, but not blurred. Then you place a noise into the “bump” channel, and animated the noise. In the render settings you take the highest sub-frame motion blur setting that you can get. If 49 frames are an option for you time wise, great. The noise in the bump channel works now like a temporal shader. As it is animated, the sub-frame motion blur changes the surface each time. In that way you get the light from all over the place into your surface. The motion blur “samples” these light information to a single image. A silky-metallic surface is the result.

The silver metallic surface, I would experiment with reflection and anisotropic shaders such as “Lumas” or materials with anisotropic options, e.g., Nukei
Both material have certainly more influence from visible light source, than directed light to them. Just a little bit of anisotropic, but perhaps, just one pass reflection, and another one blurred, and these composed later. There is a wide variety of appearances of such surfaces and I can’t really tell what the finer details are wanted. If there is a “lacquer” on top of it, perhaps multi pass is faster than to model a clear coating. Starting with a diffuse pass and perhaps leave the specular pass completely off for that.

In any case, use multi-pass rendering, to compose the material-channel results later on—layer wise. A color grading session is certainly helpful as well. To use some other standard composting “effects” might help as well.

Light
The light is more or less based on reflection. So an illuminated object, perhaps with a gradient to “vignette” the edges, should do a nice trick. Keep here in mind that reflective objects react different to light source than diffuse objects. This is normally thought in any 1x1 photographic course. I mention it, as it depends on the camera position as well. The camera for such shots should be set up first.

Note
These are very nice surfaces and they might take some trial and error, as the mix of surfacing, light/visible light as well its position plus direction, and camera position is critical. As I assume that you have our own variation in mind, and not a straight copy, I have given you a recipe instead of a scene file.

All the best

Sassi

yeah.
I have to concur with most of what Dr. Sassi has said.
Rizon uses Vray…and one of the strengths of Vray is it’s fairly fast calculation of blurry reflections…this can make a huge difference to the look of a surface (Far mor accurate than just using a wide specular highlight)

Next…lighting…this is the biggest part of these images.
Rizon is a very talented lighting artist…if you look at his work it is never “complex” geometry, or shaders, or clever texturing…he is a “photographer” more so than anything…and this is largely where the look comes from.
I would suggest googling about photography on grey backdrops.
But pretty much he is using a curved surface for the floor and wall (cyclorama) and then hitting the the curved area with a spotlight to create a bright region on the back ground.
Then for the main objects he is using softboxes (large luminante planes) to create the subtle shading across the objects.

Really though…the stuff in these images is less “technical” and more “artistic”...so really…search online for “studio lighting” or “photography”.
Much of what you find in this type of material can be applied directly to the work you do inside C4D.

Thank you Patrick, for the background information! :o)

Hi there,

Yes, a solid photographic (and photo studio) knowledge is certainly an advantage. The fact that 3D rendering and photography becomes more and more similar in their results has certainly many reasons.

Besides that, a common request is with no doubt the compositing from both “worlds”. To have an great insight, beyond the standard “1on1 in photography” supports this work to a great deal. Well I’m biased, as I photograph professionally since over three decades.

Try my “Sub-frame/Animated-noise” option, the results are very silky. If the rest of the scene has no demanding rendering requests, it is not that slow. I developed it for a very large company where I had a while ago hands on training. (They use this kind of material a lot.)

Have a great weekend

Sassi

P.S.: To make it simple, here is a scene file. I have set this to 49 iterations, perhaps a lower number might be sufficient already.

The target here was a metal which had this cork-blasted look&feel;. (… as in sand blasted, but with a soft material, which results in a silky but grainy surface). Sometimes little glass pearls are used or what ever works with the material at hand. It is certainly a wide variety of material for the basting part in use.

I have had developed this procedure nearly four years ago. As Patrick mentioned, there are different options available right now. Here is a native “hack”. ;o)

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share?s=-LlFwC9zSBwq-0shRyC70g

If you have even an older version of C4D, the Scene-Motion blur is the key here, with the animated noise in the material (bump). Perhaps slow, but you can really fine tune the material.

Thanks Dr. Sassi and Patrick, this has been quite helpful.  And the scene file was good too.

Thank you very much, Jamestown, for the nice feedback.

I’m glad the file was supportive.

Have a great start into your week.

Sassi