Cineversity

Howdy,

I am under the gun here and have been asked to model several products and produce photorealistic animated renders of them.

One of these has a component which lights up. The light is behind a wavy clear plastic enclosure, and that is inside of another smooth slightly smoky plastic enclosure. Try as I might, I cannot get the same look as the photo reference I have. I can get close-ish from a certain angle, but the illusion is lost in other angles, and even when I do get close, I still have excessive light spill. I have tried with a single light, and with a couple of dozen lights, I have set falloff to inverse square, and taken the radius / decay values as low as 4% and as high as 20%, as well as played with brightness values ranging from 100 - 1500%, and it’s just not working…

I feel there HAS to be a way to achieve this.. maybe the secret doesn’t involve a light at all, or perhaps uses a post-render trick… I just don’t know, and I am stressed to my core about this. This is one of those instances in which something that occurs simply in reality is proving a herculean task to re-create virtually.

I have attached screen shots showing a couple of angles of the lit piece from the photo reference I have, as well as the best attempt from my experiments. I appreciate beyond words any assistance or guidance that can be offered.

Thank you

Obviously here, the third image is my render… I felt when I arrived at this point, I was getting close, though I was getting far too much light spill, and worse The look doesn’t hold up if you move 90 degrees around it as I could only get to this look by moving the the lights to the front of the mesh, so they no longer looked as though there were emanating from within unless you see them from this angle.

I tried to attach a scene file, but at 14MB it’s too heavy… it is as simplified as I can make it and still be useful.  The geometry comes from a CAD conversion and is pretty dense.

By the way, I am using R15 for this project, as I was already started when I got my R16 last week.

Ok, well for the sake of anyone who may happen across this thread with a similar question, I may have found a solution.  Putting some small cylinders where the lights are to be, giving them a mostly white (with an orange fresnel gradient) material, and placing a single light in the center of them is the start.  Then, give the cylinders compositing tags and assign them to a buffer, apply the Highlights post effect to the same ID as the buffer, and dial in the Highlight settings to taste.

A tip of the hat to Eric Marodon for the idea.

Cheers

File [attached]: Use it like a “sand-box”. Explore it, tweak it and take what you need. :o) ...and yes, there are too many ideas in it.
Photorealism is a term that I avoid, it is too bendy, and clients might have a different idea about it.

However, observation is the “mother” of it. A good skill-level in photography is a must have (not just a click away and fix it in Light Room stuff), so one knows what happens to light (and how light, surfaces and camera works together). There are no short-cuts for this. YOU have to learn it. A good starting point is certainly the list in the material editor, write it down and explore your surrounding [objects] with it, what part [material editor] would be useful. Then do the same thing with light, there are over “hundred” parameters and options. Know them, and explore the objects again. Then get the options in rendering - same procedure. As a 3D-Artist that is the base to know., if that level of realism is targeted. With this in mind, the camera position and settings are critical to work with—in the same way.

Of course, just suggesting this and not delivering would be weird. I started to post some stuff “Photography for 3D Artists” here:
https://www.youtube.com/c/drsassila
As long as we do not have a frequency based light system, C4D is R-G-B based, we will not be able to reproduce, e.g., how light really behaves in a lens.

Your request: Too little information (above) was given (e.g., context, what materials, is it glass, acrylic, etc.), to get closer, and as you can see—a simplified file is possible as well. CAD files are more often than not, not at all a start for the quality you are aiming. Yes, I do not have seen what you have. As usual, you do not share and request support. We have been there many times…
Scale is certainly a factor in that set up as other parts in the scene, as light sources, objects, etc.
(…)
I would go with a multi pass render and a good color -grading/finishing. (Render in 32bit/channel, float—of course), for multipass and some light glow effects, I made [back in time] a series and not so much has changed since. It’s here on CV.

With the complexity of that theme, for starters I would suggest the book from PIXAR’s crew:
Digital Lighting and Rendering (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter) Nov 21, 2013
by Jeremy Birn
(I have read the first and second edition, but flipped through the third. Certainly a good base to have)

All in all, you might suggest this as a tutorial series. Perhaps someone is brave enough to go through this theme completely (if that is even possible)—and not just for a single object, scene, a series that creates a base for this kind of quality. It will be perhaps a work of many years to train all the skills needed to produce “photorealistic” results for anything that is thrown as challenge at an artist. It will be an “master/apprentices” kinda series, as a simple “do-this,do-that”, style will not work at all for this, never has, never will.

Take care.

[edit, Jan 17]

I just wanted to provide an update on this. The project in question was part of a huge time-suck wherein I put in over 120 hours in about 10 days time, on top of working my normal 40-hour / week day job.  The aftermath was a relapse of the flu I contracted in December, and I am only now getting my bearings back and catching up with the world.

Dr Sassi - thank you for the file and the suggested reading, I will take all from that I can to better grasp this sort of technique.  Ultimately, I ended up achieving a decent approximation of the look by using a combination of render passes, the Optical Flares plugin in After Effects, color-correcting adjustment layers, and a lot of old-fashioned hand keys.  It was tedious, but the end result was decent.

Cheers all,
  - Will