My first post here. I’ve got very little experience with 3D software, but I wanted to learn to use Blender for some basic stuff (although I’ve seen some amazing work in the galleries).
After watching around 4 hours of YouTube tutorials I opened Blender for the first time yesterday to play around. I’m having some trouble with lighting my scene, and hope someone can offer some pointers.
I’ve setup a plane with emission but no matter how strong I set the light, my bottle in render preview looks really dark. Changing the floor plane to a lighter colour helps, but not by much. I’ve attached my blend file which might be a little messy now that I’ve been trying out all the options etc.
Also attached is an early render of the bottle, which as well as being dark has a lot of random artifacts.
Quite a few issues with that mesh…
a) Doubled geometry and inconsistent normals: Tab into Edit mode, hit A to select all, then W > Remove Doubles and finally Ctrl-N to recalculate the normals.
b) Mesh has no thickness:
Your mesh is actually not a bottle, but a massive block of glass, as the walls have no “thickness”. A Solidify modifier should to the trick.
c) N-gons:
Top and bottom of that bottle are so called n-gons = polygons with more than four vertices. These will pinch quite heavily under Subsurf. Either get rid of them or isolate them with additional edge loops in rounded areas.
d) Dark glass color:
The tint of the glass shader is too strong. Very minor deviations from white will result in quite a strong glass color. Try to lighten that up.
e) Give reflective surfaces something to reflect:
e.g. by using a HRDI for the environment.
