JD-Bottle

Layout

The first to decide is what kind of Backdrop/Environment will be used. I chose the kitchen_probe HDR image because I liked the "mood" of the scene and because a bottle of Jack Daniel's would seem slightly misplaced inside the St. Peters Cathedral...

So add an ImageWorld on the Backdrop panel and load kitchen_probe from your LightwaveImagesHDR directory. (you'll have to load the kitchen_probe using the ImageEditor before that)

Then I added my bottle and a box that had to serve as a table to the scene, placed my camera and adjusted the angle and lens until I liked it. The following testrenders were made using the default spotlight without change and only to determine the "right" brightness and rotation settings for the kitchen_probe ImageWorld. To cut the render times, you can reduce the Ray Recursion Limit to say 4 and set the resolution to about 400x300. To do the testrenders before adding the objects would of course speed up the rendering even more but is not necessarily a good idea because you wouldn't be able to judge if the reflections are too bright or dim.

Here are the ImageWorld settings that worked best for me:

Heading = 80°

Brightness = 50%

I wanted to have the window to the left and slightly to the back, because in this location/area I would place my main light and so the caustics would be clearly visible, not hidden by the geometry. Using a Bank rotation on the camera adds drama to the scene. The camera lens was set relatively low at 21,3 mm (on a 35mm motion picture camera) to implie a sense of dynamics (higher lens settings tend to look "static"). I'm a big fan of low lens settings :-)

Click to enlarge

Now let's set up the lights. Set Ambient Intensity to 0%. The light colors should reflect the colors found in the backdrop to achieve a smooth blend between the objects and the backdrop. I chose to simulate this manually, but you can get Overcaster by Eki Halkka (which I highly recommend anyway) to make this task even simpler and use "Ambimage". Ambimage is even able to mimic "Backdrop Only" Radiosity settings... Back to the point:

Here are the Light settings in detail:

Some more words on the Render Options settings and we're done:

Of course you should enable Raytrace Reflections and Raytrace Refractions, getting the right amount of the Ray Recursion Limit is more difficult; to low and the glass won't look right, too high and your render times go through the roof. I found my sweet spot at 6. (hmm, the joy of six, I guess I should retry 7).

On the Global Illumination panel enable Caustics and start with an Accuracy of 6,000 (the max setting is 10,000) and an Intensity of 50%. You can play with the values until you achieve a look you like and gain some feeling for them.

One more thing:

Depth Of Field is like instant realism. I highly recommend using it, be it as the standard DOF or the newly integrated Digital Confusion. I used DC and added an empty as an AutoFocus controller.

That's it, we're through.

I hope you had some fun reading this tutorial and even more importantly learned something new. If you want to comment on this tute, feel free to drop me a mail.

And remember:

"mesh" is only one letter away from "mess"