This week I had some free time and for god only knows what reason I was looking at my Lorier Gemini watch through a jewelers loupe, because that’s a completely normal thing to do with your free time, and there are like these 2 super-bright LEDs that stick out on the bottom of the loupe to light what you are looking at, and the minute I saw the watch with it I was like, I need to make this. Used up my weekend away from my job product modeling to model a product haha. I really just fell in love with how, just, generally bad the loupes lens is. Pinpoint focus, a depth of field that just makes things look like you’re seeing double, a stupid amount of chromatic aberration. Under any normal circumstance, these are all qualities we aim to avoid in good photogrpahy at all cost so I typically like to use them very subtly, and then actually in the post-processing work go back and remove them so it has a little bit of a retouched look. In this case, I really just wanted to push all that upfront. My goal with this project is for you to feel the excitement and magic that I felt looking through my jewelers loupe.
As an additional note. I did get permission from Lorier to post, share, and use this piece in my portfolio, so, a huge shout out to Lorier for allowing me to share my original vision unaltered.
since the intention is to get the feeling of looking through a loupe there are a few little things like that just to sort of change how you perceive the image. Around the lens is a super small barrel with accordion rings to give it a little anisotropy as it moves down the length. This does a few things. First is because it is off-center it will reshape the bokeh to be just ever so slightly elliptical. The second is, it adds a natural vignette. Third is in some areas you don’t know that you notice it is actually creating some light texture around the edges of the image. Its a fun trick you can try if you have DOF on, Just know that it certainly CAN add render time but in my case, it was only taking up like 1 minute of a 15-minute render so I am not complaining.
I dont know if it is or isnt. I used octane. Cycles certainly is not this physically correct with caustics or metals and octans spectral shifting is beautiful and is heavily predominant in bad $12 amazon jewelers loups which is why I cranked it up to like 0.3 which is pretty high for spectral shifting on a reflection and not a light source
For me it’s a hazard if the job so I got used to it. I am a product animator so a lot of my work goes to just what the client wants and due to rights and usage will never see the light of day ever again
Well, this change situation of course.
When I ask one guy why he don’t have online portfolio, he answer that he only can post screenshots from movies… unfortunately this is reality for many good artists. However you renders are top league.
I plan to try to do a lot more. And thank you. It’s definitely tricky with how much of my time is dedicated to my clients but I really want to make a habit of doing more personal work
