Finally an image I feel confident posting in the finished projects section.
This is my entry for this weeks weekend challenge #753, themed “80´s technology”.
I titled it “Bandsalat” - The German word for a chewed up tape.
One thing I remember very well form the pre digital age are compact cassettes, used both for playing music and storing computer games. - The goal was to go as photoreal as possible with this.
I modeled the cassette in Fusion 360 but spent ten times more time working in Blender to get the scene, materials and lighting right. ^^
Rendertime with a 1060 and 750Ti card combined was about two hours for the 3000x2000px image with 1000 samples. I skipped the denoising, since I felt the noise would add to the vintage look of the rendering. Post and color adjustments were done in Affinity Photo & Photoshop.
Hey DM9, really awesome entry, you should setup a gallery of all your works! Also you only rendered at 100 samples? I don’t see how that is possible, when I render at 100 samples it looks very grainy and poor, I have to do 1k+ to even get remotely decent… But looking at your post again you say the dimensions were 3k so is it that you can render at a lower sample and just scale the image down? The image looks very clean and well rendered for just 100 samples… I must figure this out.
Hey Rob, did I miss to put a zero somewhere? - It was in fact 1000 samples for the rendering. The image was still a bit noisy with that amount of samples, but I thought it would help to achieve a bit of a grainy 80s analog photography look in this case. At some point in the post work I used photoshops “remove noise” filter on an additional layer to smooth some parts of the image out a bit, where I thought the noise was too sharp.
This looks incredibly realistic! I’m very amazed at how good this looks. I feel like I shouldn’t point this out but as it might help you, I’ll say it. Actually, if memory serves me right, I remember that black tape that comes out of the cassettes used to be a lot shinier than that. It was actually very shiny!
You can do a caustics pass with YafaRay and compose it with the cycles render to give the scene more interest and realism. Not only ray passing through plastic (IOR = 1,46) but also rays reflected by the shinny tape can be considered as a refractive event. Caustics will tend to be in the most upper part of the histogram with little contrast in within.
Thanks for all the feedback. @alf0, there is actually nothing special to the lighting, in fact it turned out bloody simple for this scene. ^^ … All it is is a sun turned towards the tapes from the left and a very dim HDRI at 0,1 to give some fill light and reflections. - I established some basic shaders, defined the lighting and then tweaked the shaders “endlessly” until the preview rendering looked right.
Edit: Color management is set to Filmic, Exposure 0, Gamma 1, Base Contrast, No curves.
Nice, looks almost identical to a photo. I also wonder if that barely-visible background pencil is a subtle nod to how the tape is going to get back in?