Making Of 'Ornaments'

First of all, let me say thank you for giving me the chance to write this tutorial for your great community!

I produced this image after a long stressful job, when I needed to do something nice for a break.  I saw an illustration on purerender.com "-The Chesterfield Project-" and I was blown away by the level of detail! When I looked closer at the details, I saw some glasses on the table and I thought, "I want to try it by myself, to create such realism in a 3D rendering".

So that was my inspiration!

I started with the modeling of the glasses! That was not too difficult. I found some glasses on the internet via Google. I saved the images and put them in the background to have as references (Fig.01). 

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

I drew the glasses with splines and tried to match the references exactly (Fig.02).

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

It was important that the glass had a shell or wall, in case I wanted to fill it with some liquid. I used the Lathe mod. in Max to achieve this (Fig.03).

Fig. 03

Fig. 03



I created some other glasses and shapes in the same way to have some variation in the image (Fig.04 & Fig.05).

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

I did not want to model the ornaments directly on the glasses to have more control and also to have the chance to try out different ornaments.

I used a standard glass VRay material for the shader, so nothing special there. Even the IOR of the material was not specific for glass. This was so I could have a fast rendering time (Fig.06)!

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

Now I came to the ornament part. I did some research on the internet for ornaments and floral shapes and I found this image (Fig.07).

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

There was no need to do any color corrections or b/w image changes because I did not want sharp edges. I thought it would look much better to have some softer edges that mixed together. So I put the image in the bump slot of my glass material and set the amount to 10. That gave me the best result for the ornaments (Fig.08).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

For the glasses I just used a simple cylindrical UVW map (Fig.09).

Fig. 09 - Click to Enlarge

Fig. 09 - Click to Enlarge

Now that the glasses were done and the material, as simple as it was, was done too, I was able to start on the lighting. I wanted a photo-real lighting setup so I decided to use an HDR image for the reflection and lighting. I used a free HDRI map that I'd found somewhere on the internet (Fig.10).

Fig. 10 - Click to Enlarge

Fig. 10 - Click to Enlarge

Fig. 11 - Click to Enlarge

Fig. 11 - Click to Enlarge

I rotated the map about 355 degrees horizontal to get the light from the best location. Here I tried some different rotations with test renderings so that I could get the perfect result. There was no need to put the map in a VRay environment slot, because I wanted to render everything in one pass. I did not any extra lighting or highlights in the scene.

Next I set the depth of field for the camera. I used a standard Max camera and the DoF of the VRay render dialog. I set the aperture to .012m and got the rest from the camera. To get the typical product shot settings I used an almost telephoto lens of 180 mm (Fig.11).

The render settings are nothing special. You can check them out in Fig.12.

Fig. 12 - Click to Enlarge

Fig. 12 - Click to Enlarge

It saves the rendering with 32 bit because I work with the linear work flow to get the full light information in the image for the post work.

I did some strong post work on this image one, which mostly consisted of color correction in Photoshop. The steps that I followed can be seen in Fig.13.

Fig. 013

Fig. 013

First I checked the levels and corrected the white, black and middle values until I was happy with the result. The next step was to correct the contrast and the color; I did it in the green blue values to get the result I wanted. The selective colors are a strong tool in Photoshop as they allow you to adjust single colors and correct them.

Finally I added some chromatic aberration and a vignette to the final image to get the last photo-real look (Fig.14).

Fig. 14

So, that was all for that image. Thanks you very much for reading my tutorial!

All the best
Jan K. Vollmer

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