Hi everyone ! My name is Nandeya Charles i’m a 3D generalist artist working with opensource software since 2009 (blender 2.49 era). Most of the time i’m doing architecturale visualisation with blender and Luxcorerenderer , but sometime i get involved in some product advertising and design project.
Back in 2019 before the corona thing i was working on a cosmetic product visualisation for an actual brand with a team of talented artists from different country via internet.It was a really great experience.
i was in charge of the modelling lighting and shading part. Due to the challenging nature of the project (Lot of glass and very reflective surface plus some caustics animation) Luxcore has been our choice right at the bigining.
Thanks to David Bucciarlli the lead devs and BYOB the addon devs the instant caustics feature was already available and production ready.
pre-production render took just 5mn on a 1080Ti in full HD so it was really interesting to render full animation frames on renderstreet (render.st) one of the first renderfarm with early support for luxcore.
there was also some advance compositing needed for masking and flexibility. So all frames were saved in OpenEXR format and composited in Blackmagic Fusion.
After a very Long NDA time i’m happy to share it with you :
Yes !
The most reliable one is the disney shader. The node that aren’t really readable are light path node/ layer weight / ambiant occlusion … Node that not make sense in luxcore perspective as you don’t need related tricks to bypass engine limitation.
the simpler the node tree the easier it will be translated.
Looking great. One small niggle. The pipette, having clearly been in the liquid since it contains liquid, should have some moisture on the outside for increased realism.
Have you ever worked for an agency on something like this?
Comments like these are irrelevant when you don’t know how much input you can add as a artist yourself…
And for high level brands like these, - e v e r y t h i n g - is micro managed and checked and rechecked against company policies regarding brand recognition.
It can be a long and tedious process to get it the way their guidelines demand.
Really good job on this. @object said my thoughts exactly. The only thing that sorta caught me off guard a bit was the camera movement. Ease out is your friend on product shots and if you want the hard stop I usually still use an ease out effect and just cut the clip short, but that fall off really helps it feel more natural. Ease in and out and linear movements are sorta no go’s a lot of times because they just don’t feel natural. For robotic movements even I still usually use just a smidge of ease in like it is accelerating to help give that extra bit of dynamics.
I love this work. But sorry if it is a newbie’s question :
What is Luxcore ? … I mean, I understood that it is a render engine … but why using it for this project ?
Is it better for glass ?
Stefan Werner
As a Cycles developer, I recommend LuxCore if photorealism is your primary goal.
The engine is also very fast when it come to glass treatment and caustics.
It is also faster and more realistic for interior rendering Due to the integrated cache solution comparable to what Vray and Corona use.
The workflow In Luxcore also is more straightfoward and simple in general compared to Cycles for example.
I mean forget about Combersome Node tree to speed up rendering ,fake Gi with ambiant occlusion and light path node Or complexe Caustics/dispersion shader. It is less trickery with one click solution.
BTW it is a bit limited in very abstract and extreme artistic use cases.
I don’t mean it is the best at everything :
For example it is slower when rendering Volumetric effect Like Smoke. It can also be outperform by cycles in simple scene like non glass product visualisation (the bigger the project faster it is).
Also i think Opensource CGI artist need to have the choice like other artist in the industry:
If you take someone like Bertrand Benoit ( a great artist a really like) : he use mainly Vray and Corona render but sometime he have hand on GPU renderer like Fstorm or Octane.
I consider Render engine like Real world Camera :
_ Some are able to shoot high quality image at the stars in a very deep dark night
_ Some have incredible Color tones
_ Some are very robust waterproof and light weight
_Some are easy to use and very pratical
As a photographer will not restrict himself from using or try many different camera & brands
A Cgi artist shouldn’t be trapped into a single tool view. Sadly in recent years External engine don’t get great support frome community like in the past where it was common to see best blender artists use engine like yafaray or Luxrender and even make tutorial about it.
Thank’s a lot Sharlybg for this long and interesting answer.
I will definitely try Lux … for the sake of experiment …
Have a nice day … or night … ( depends on your favorite work hours :o) )
