My first proper model

Hi all. Looking for ideas on lighting etc. Only been using blender for about 2 months now. I have no technical knowledge of composition or photography.

Thanks in advance



Hi WhamBam, I take it you own one of these instruments that’s why you modelled it. The first thing straight away is these instruments never float, and that looks brand new, so it either be in its box, on a table with a cushion, or being held, or even on a stand.

it needs an environment to be in, if you do play one of these just think where do you play it, take a picture and that’s your environment.
you don’t need that much technical knowledge, a camera phone is good enough. On you-tube there is a million videos on what everything about the cameras is, Mike Browne is ok and his voice isn’t that bad to listen to, and you will soon pick up what he saying and understand the different panels in blender and what they are, and what they used for. things like aperture settings, blades, rule of thirds, composition.

ok lighting, pop over to Greg Zaals he owns the adaptivesamples site, and produces high quality HDR’s, and he a blender geek, his node wrangler add on is a must. he has a very nice garage HDR lots of browns and yellow in it, which would help to light you scene.

not sure how to add a HDR, just ask.

Ok the model, at first it looks really nice, but there are a few points, on some of the curves, you can see straight edges, so either you not enough vertices or not enough subsurf.

Pop over to you-tube again and check out cynicat pro, you after his video on fresnel and how to put in a rim colour. Andrew Price did one as well and says he took lots of advice from cynicat pro.

There loads of great videos. blenderstack exchange has lots of information and blender nation is always showing great stuff.

Ok vertices, how many is enough. the subsurf modifier is great it can turn a cube into a sphere, but when it comes to UV unwrapping you need to think ahead, if you don’t have enough vertices and you are relying totally on the subsurf modifier to achieve the shape you want, when you try to add an image. in this case, dirty finger print decal, (cg textures now called textures.com) you find that if you don’t have enough vertices you will be stretching your image, to many vertices and you memory count goes up. so you got to find a happy balance.


ok you see in this there is actually no colour to the materials.


ok all the colour is coming from the reflections off the HDR.


OK this is the result after rendering, no colour on the bell, all from the HDR,

The ugly grey box is just a placement box to tell me where the trumpet would be and to align the camera at the start. later it will be used a a parent to join all the parts of the trumpet to, if i want to move it, easier to move one object than many.

i use scenes. the first scene is just a box nomally and rendered using the CPU and set to 6 cores only, so that means if i want i can stop it.
the other scenes if they not to big can use the GPU. Blender will allow you to change how scenes are rendered, how many cycles and so on, so when it comes to compositing, it will revert back to the CPU, the compositor usually uses a high memory count.
normally i wouldn’t include the first scene in the render at all, it only here now so you can see how we add different layers and scenes together.

Hope this helps a bit.

the proportion is different from a real trumpet.

the floor take away from the focus of the instrument