This is my first complex model rendered in V-ray.
I had this model in WIP and corrected a few glaring artifacts. I may revisit it at a later date for use in a different environment, otherwise it’s finished. Comments and suggestions and criticism greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Chris Hovey
Very nice. The brushed metal looks good. The tiles in the background look funny, I think because the shadow is wrong.
I have an old Rotel stereo amp at home, still goes good.
one crit, the corners are very shiny.
nothing stays that shiny except a mirror.
good work, though.
though, do you have any idea why there are so many vray renders all of a sudden? 
(by newcomers, too, mostly)
Soren—thanks for the comments, yes, regarding the tile, I need to either find a different background tile texture or clean the existing one in Photoshop. I created this particular project to help to sell my current employer on growing our 3-D area beyond modeling consumer packaged goods, and will eventually drop in different environments to demonstrate the flexibility of the process. The argument I always face against the 3-D still-render process has always, “why don’t you just shoot a photo?”
I downloaded the texture from a free CG texture site and it’s a bit rough. I disabled the displacement map as well on that surface as it was killing my render time. The floor tile surface is using displacement and the whole image took around 2 hours to render on an 8-core Mac Pro. I may be better off to use Blender’s internal displacement modifier and see if if it improves or adds to the rendering time.
I love Rotel too. I’m using a surround pre/pro and power amp from the early 2000’s as well. Still going strong as well 
I think the background just doesn’t match the product, but yeah, the light seems not to match as well(Also the resolution for the background seems lower than the rest of the objects). Maybe try turning the texture 180 degrees?
rotate texture as mentioned previously
then in the img properties scale it so its a lot smaller and thus sharper
otherwise i really like
Spacetug:
The rounded corners of the front are a more reflective surface without a brushed texture. Like you said though, my fresnel reflection IOR is a bit too high in the V-ray settings as it’s picking up too much glare from the front area light. I need to adjust the area light to change the angle of incidence and thus angle of reflectance to hide the glare. The other main source of illumination is a small spot just above and in front of the product.
This is a link to a real photo of the product. You can see the differences in materials between the corners and face plate…
Regarding the V-ray posts, I think you are seeing more because Andrey Izrantsev’s excellent export script is including more and more features as it has advanced through its beta stages. V-ray is also relatively affordable in terms of a commercial rendering engine. To keep costs down where I work, it made sense to implement a hybrid pipeline using a powerful open source mesh modeler and an extremely efficient, biased rendering engine. I’m also a big fan of LuxRender and Yaf(a)ray, however I’m waiting for more speed and further development (SSS) out of them before I’m ready to implement them into our production pipeline. The thing I like most about LuxRender and Yaf(a)ray is their ease of use for setting up materials.
Looks great!
How did you do the LCD screen? Is that a comp or did you get textured emitters working?
looks good you might want to put a tiny bevel on the edges
StompinTom:
Thanks, you’re right, the texture emitter is not functional. I tried that first as it would have been less laborious than the approach I took. All of my reference illustrations I pulled out of the owners manual PDF from the Rotel website—including the display information. I opened the PDF in Adobe Illustrator, and then exported the LCD display text as a postscript .SVG file and imported this into Blender. I took the curve information and then converted into a regular mesh. I had to do a little cleanup work as not all of the postscript curves were read correctly. Some letters that have knocked out detail such as the letter A, O, R, D, etc. were filled curves. Once I cleaned up the mesh, I gave it a cyanish diffuse color with a slight emit value to turn into into the V-ray Light Material. This may be a more realistic way of simulating the LCD display vs. a texture comp since I essentially turned the mesh into individual light emitting components. I attached the wireframe below:
IBKNAT:
I actually have a bevel/rounded edge, but the scaling of it is way too small compared to the rest of the object. I need to change the scaling. Good point! I attached a wireframe below:
