Violin

Here is a violin I made in my spare time, It took 5 minutes to render at 50 samples with post processing in Gimp.



Enjoy xD

Feedback is welcome. I’m trying to get better with photorealism so I would love to hear what I could do to make it better :smiley:

What amazes me the most is that is only needs 50 samples to render :smiley: (It may need a bit more around the strings though?)

I don’t have much to say aside it looks great and realistic to me. Maybe you could have shot it from a bit further to include all the left part, it distracts me a little bit. Also the modeling quality makes me want to see the other side (the head).

I imagine the fact it’s not very glossy and there is some “bumpness” is you didn’t want to make is varnished (is it the right term)?

Hey,

“What amazes me the most is that is only needs 50 samples to render :smiley: (It may need a bit more around the strings though?)”

I’ve noticed that I never seem to need over 500 samples when rendering. I don’t know why that is, maybe just my CPU, I was going to go a bit higher for the strings but I had been working on it all day and just wanted to move on so I might render it again tonight.

“I don’t have much to say aside it looks great and realistic to me. Maybe you could have shot it from a bit further to include all the left part, it distracts me a little bit. Also the modeling quality makes me want to see the other side (the head).”

I forgot to compensate for the Lens Distortion that was added in post production and like I said before, I just wanted to move on. I might render from some different angles later.

“I imagine the fact it’s not very glossy and there is some “bumpness” is you didn’t want to make is varnished (is it the right term)?”

I wasn’t sure what I was doing with the wood. I wanted it varnished, but I also saw a lot of violins that didn’t have that varnish and instead were very similar to this. There are so many different styles of Violin that I just picked one and went

Also, the bottom of the violin was sunk into the plane that it was sitting on so I will fix that when I re-render the image. So there is some tweaking to be done, but now I understand that I should go through and look at all the details of the image before I send them off.

Yeah a few details here and there, but nothing serious. I forgot to say the lighting looks really good.

As a violinist I do spot some mistakes here. But still, it does look really nice! So first of all, the wood texture looks a bit weird to me, I think the reason for this is that it looks bumpy, but a violin is very smooth and normally has an almost glossy look to it. The second thing is that the strings look to diffuse to me, try to make them look glossy and that’s fine :slight_smile: The last thing I have to add is that violins usually have a little bump all around the edge on top, if you know what I mean. Everything else looks very good :slight_smile:

I was hoping no one that played the Violin would see this xDD. Thanks, I made a couple new renders of it and I changed the glossiness and the roughness of the wood texture since I agree, it didn’t look…right. The strings are just a glossy shader but I think the HDRI I used was making it look diffuse, I played with them a bit in the new renders. My reference photo didn’t actually have that little bump so I didn’t bother, I was thinking about it but I decided it looked alright already.

Here are the two new renders:





Thanks for the input xD

Thanks to your new renders I spotted a new flaw : the strings are not straight from the bridge to each extremity. From the bridge, they start in a straight direction and then make an angle at some point, which is very visible on the view from top. Can I ask how you modeled them ? I mean from a mesh or a curve etc.
Also, It seems they all have the same thickness, whereas the ones on the right should be thinner.
Sorry to bring new remarks, it’s only to improve an already very good modeling :slight_smile:

xDD I modeled them using curves, the only problem was after I converted them to meshes, I subdivided them and it changed their shape slightly. I thought about the string thickness but I had already had enough trouble modeling them the first time, I didn’t want to do it again. I’ll keep it in mind if I plan on doing another render, but for this I think i’ll just leave it xDD thanks for the input. Its always welcome.

I’m currently doing a guitar myself and I use curves too, but without converting them to mesh. You can change the thickness by changing the bevel depth, and don’t need to remodel them. Anyway I understand if you want to let them this way, but if you want I can show you the method I use, I found it useful for modeling strings.

Sure, a friend wants me to try creating a Harp Guitar so it’ll be nice to learn a better way to make strings. I’ve already converted the ones on the Violin so I might remake them tonight and make yet another set of renders.

I don’t know how you proceeded but there’s my simple method :

  • Create a Bezier or nurbs curve ;
  • In the data tab, under “Shape”, make sure 3D is selected, and in the dropbox “Fill”, select Full ;
  • Under “Geometry”, increase the bevel depth to give it some thickness ;
  • Increase the Resolution to make the section of the curve look like a circle ;
  • Once you placed the string like you want, duplicate it and change the bevel depth just a bit to make another string, for example.

Imo the easiest way is to keep them as curves make sure you can change the thickness or replace them better afterwards.
I’m still quite noob so I’m interested in knowing how you did it, I got that from a tutorial.

Btw I just googled “harp guitar” and it looks intriguing, I didn’t know this instrument ^^

Interesting, That’s how I did it xD. The main problem I have with this method is the smoothness of the curve. I don’t know how to put it, but since its curve, its hard to remove that shape that makes the string look loose. I think another way of doing it could be making a square, making it as thin as the string required, and extruding it out along the violin. Only extrude from the areas that will affect where the string is going. So you’d extrude from the bridge, the top of the neck, and at the tuning peg. then just subdivide it to make it spherical and there’s your string. I don’t know how well that’d work though, I’ll try it tonight when I go to remake this

Looks good, but usually they have a much more glossy smooth finish

nice lighting btw

Well by playing with the “handles” of each point you can get something which looks good, but I see what you mean. I tried to model from a cylinder before, but that was really tedious compared to curves, especially to twist them around the tuning pegs. And if I wanted to change the thickness afterwards, well… it’s not easy at all. But if you want to try by yourself, go and tell me ^^

The modeling looks quite good overall to my eye, but the texture on the soundboard bothers me. Soundboards are typically made from very dense straight-grained quarter sawn lumber, whereas the texture you used has a less regular grain and some plain grain showing under the strings and in the top left of the body in the top view image. Using a tighter, more regular grain isn’t as visually interesting, but I think it would be more accurate and would help with photorealism.
Hope this is helpful!

I like the wooden texture and the light setup. I have no other feedback, I think it looks good, nice job.

Electromagnet: Yes It is xD Most of my reference photos had a dense grain wood but I thought it looked quite plain

Benny_Flex: Thanks. It’s a single emission plane and an HDRI


I fixed the strings. I used curves since I thought about the method I proposed and I realized how much of a pain it would be xD

Maybe you have square samples enabled? Or you’re using branched path tracing? 50 is very low, but 50^2=2500 makes perfect sense.

The CPU you have will not change the quality of the render at a given number of samples, it just determines how long it takes to do that many.

Edit: Forgot to say, the render is stunning. That wood shader <3