Austrian Imperial Crown (blend files included)

[loramel]

I made this project as modelling exercise and to explore some of the new possibilities luxrender has to offer.

The original crown was created in 1602 by Jan Vermeyen as private crown for Rudolf II emperor of the holy roman empire.

In 1804 this crown was chosen to be the official imperial crown of the austrian empire. Today it is on display in the treasury in vienna.

Modelled in blender, rendered with luxrender 0.6rc1

All project files are now downloadable from my blog site.

hope you enjoy it.



link to hires version

[Viator]

very very nice indeed!

[Blendiac]

Holy cow!

That's awesome! The gold, the pearls, the gems, the silk... what a beautiful piece of texturing and lighting (not to mention modelling).

The thought of having this kind of renderer integrated into Blender makes me drool...

[PenelopeBrain]

It could hardly look more real. Awesome!

[Blendiac]

Seriously, that looks better than any of the example images in LuxRenders gallery.

You really need to send this in to them.

[Jesus]

This turned out really great.
Fantastic job!
5* (of course )

[Trichter]

Wow, great job!

How long did you work on this piece?

[Vivid]

Incredible, simply astonishing. This belongs in the Forum Gallery.

[loramel]

Thank you all for your comments. They are very much appreciated

As with all my projects, the project files are now downloadable from my blog site.

I plan to start a series of breakdowns on certain aspects of this project, which may eventually evolve into some mini howto.

Originally Posted by Blendiac Seriously, that looks better than any of the example images in LuxRenders gallery. You really need to send this in to them.

Its already there

[Carbonflux]

nice work loramel, I watched the WIP for this one, you went thru a lot of experiments I think it was worth it

The modeling work is great and you got nice reflections in the end, the gold even looks a bit "older" in this one.

I think Lux is a great tool for visualizing priceless objects.

What was the finial primitive count?

[loramel]

Originally Posted by Carbonflux nice work loramel, I watched the WIP for this one, you went thru a lot of experiments I think it was worth it The modeling work is great and you got nice reflections in the end, the gold even looks a bit "older" in this one. I think Lux is a great tool for visualizing priceless objects. What was the finial primitive count?

Thanks Carbonflux.

Yes, it was a valuable learning trip. If you mean by primitive count the vertex count its was at 1.8 million. How many single objects there are I don't know, but its many

Originally Posted by Trichter Wow, great job! How long did you work on this piece?

This project took me the better part of the last 3 weeks, working in my spare time sometimes sacrificing too much private life

[enricoceric]

Wow, what a work !! Very nice man, Luxrender is getting better and better. Can you say a bit about your settings, I mean, light, render settings and colorspace/gamma values ?

[HadesVsPluto]

Wow !!! Respect! THIS looks REAL!

[loramel]

Originally Posted by enricoceric Wow, what a work !! Very nice man, Luxrender is getting better and better. Can you say a bit about your settings, I mean, light, render settings and colorspace/gamma values ?

Thanks a lot enricoceric.

Yes, luxrender has become quite a tool.

About the light setup: I used 3 mesh lights from the front 2 from each side and one as indirect light for the background. The lights were assigned a measured lampspectrum (a phillips fluorescent daylight setting). This new lampspectrum feature does really make a difference in plausibility of a scene. A very great feature.

I experimented with some hdri background, but there seem to be some light energy scaling issues in luxrender at the moment, so I used a semi sphere encasing the setup acting as mesh light at very low intensity for some ambient lighting.

Render settings were BiDir (raydepth 50 each eyedepth, lightdepth) with Metropolis Light Transport. Colorspace set to sRGB. I rendered to an untonemapped exr to get the most flexibility in the final tonemapping.

Rendertime for the full 1600x2000 was ~24hrs to reach 1100 s/px, but the quality was already quite acceptable after 8 hrs rendering at ~360 s/px. (quadcore phenom @ 2.4Ghz).

For the tonemapping I used qtpfsgui and used there the reinhard02 algorithm. reinhard05 gave very good results too (more warm yellow gold tones) but I settled on this one.

No other postpro was done.

I hope that sheds some light on the technical aspects.

[Carbonflux]

Originally Posted by loramel Render settings were BiDir (raydepth 50 each eyedepth, lightdepth) with Metropolis Light Transport.

Heh, sorry to be a "nerd" but can I ask exactly what metropolis settings you used?

1100 s/p is very low for this kind of scene with that high a path depth. It looks great tho

[loramel]

I didn't change the default settings for the MLT so no Advanced Settings and the Mutation strength to 0.6.

To be honest I have no idea (yet) how to use these settings to my advantage and to tune it for specific setups, so I just let it be the default

[Carbonflux]

Thank you, that helps

heh, metropolis settings do seem to be a bit of a "black art"

[enricoceric]

Thanks so much Loramel for those very useful information.

[Boogie]

Man why did you decided to make such a complex model?? =S

[GodOfBigThings]

Amazing!
Stunning!
Astonishing!
Fantastic!...and all that stuff
How come this is not in the gallery?