These days I’m busy with a set of presentation renderings for elevator interiors. More like product presentation than archviz but a good work&blending opportunity.

I was a bit worried about managing this in Blender internal because I have never tried this kind of close-up detailed shiny image.

However it’s coming out nicely. The image above is a generic derived image, the actual project is more fun and colorful, only I can’t show it here as it is still in design stage.

I used AO and a bit of environment light, an area light in the doorway plus the four spotlights. There are also four small point lights just inside the spotlight that make the actual object look better but are set only for the spotlight layer so they don’t count in the light scheme. I also tried to use indirect lighting but just couldn’t get a good result so I went back to this simpler scheme. I think the all-reflecting materials make up for the lack of indirect lighting.

Much of the shiny quality comes from the glossy reflecting materials. Glossy reflections look wonderful but give noise artifacts so for the final renders I will have to increase the glossy samples a bit, as well as the AO samples and AA samples so I expect a large render time, maybe up to an hour. There are also banding problems in some areas – that is: areas that should have smooth gradation in lightness but instead shows visible bands of colour. These usually come from surfaces with gradual lighting an no texturing so I’ll have to work on that a bit.

For the first time I’m enjoying trying out various effects in the compositor (as an indirect result of the Nature Academy course). The compositor is really worth the try in architectural visualisation. Besides sharpen, contrast and color adjustments you can do directly in Blender without switching software, I love the tricks that add photo realism to the image, like glare and DOF.

Here is the untouched and a bit dull rendered image:

And here my compositor crochet work:

I think I overdid the contrast correction, it is better to achieve the best light results before post-processing, as editing will bring out badly all artifacts… only this time I was too enthusiastic with the Compositor and finally getting the hang of it 🙂