Basically, I would like to mimic something like this (I added the time code but in case that does not work, it is at 25:24.):
I create a crude phone model to test the animation (again, not meant to be exactly like the iPhone). The problem is the lighting. (1) Everything looks grey. (2) I tried to mimic the “sheen” effect by adding an elongated area light. Is that how it is done? (3) What about the edge lighting at the end of animation? In summary what lights to add and where to make it look like that iPhone advert?
Below is my rendered animation and I attach the Blender file.
Hey there looked at your blend file. Here are some tips you can use to improve your animation.
bring your background closer to the camera.
instead of principled bsdf use emmision shader for the texture of the background.
in the screen material of your phone just plug in your pic directly to the color input of the emmision shader and delete the rest.
I myself am a beginner in blender so I hope these tips help. Also checkout my own mobile commercial which I recently posted. Mobile commercial
Thanks. I followed your tips and now the background looks white. But the phone itself still looks grey, especially the bezel, where I had set “white” colour. Do you know how to make the phone not grey?
Also, about the sheen, in the Apple’s version, the white rectangle is sort of fuzzy. But I used an elongated area light and the edge is too hard. Did Apple also use area light? If so, how come their light edge is not as hard?
I added a second area light at the left-bottom to mimic the edge light at the end of Apple’s video, but it does not look like Apple’s…
Very probably, this was a multi-pass animation project. “The first thing to accomplish is to make the phone look right.” “The entirely separate next step is to add the effects.” (And it’s perfectly acceptable, by the way, to create those effects one at a time.) The very last stage is the compositing “mix-down,” where all the various elements are artistically combined.
The “effects pass” outputs, by the way, might look rather strange by themselves. If you’ve ever looked at a “shadow pass” you know what I mean. The first step of “sheen” might well be a false-color image that simply shows (1) where the sheen is, and (2) how bright it reflects light, (3) how much it affects hue-and-saturation of whatever is supposed to be behind it, and (4) how dense it is. (Separate data streams might be encoded as R, G, and B, or they might have been done separately. Who knows. “Whatever works!”)
Subsequent stages – perhaps the “mix-down” – will use these data to modify the final image pixels in some artistic way. It will be a “complex and carefully-devised node network.” A multi-step breakdown process gives you control over the final deliverable without incurring “re-render” costs. You can be as creative as you wish and see the results instantly.
A very famous photographer once observed that “a photograph is captured in the camera, but it is made in the darkroom.” This mantra is certainly also true here. The magnificent images that you are seeing in that commercial almost certainly did not come from just one render. Every movie that you watch, every song that you hear today, is the product of just such an iterative process.