Hello Blender Artists community!
I made 18 renders for a watch brand, and I thought I should share it here. I rendered these at 7200px, to maintain clarity. Unfortunately I can’t upload that resolution here, as the limit is 40MP compared to 51MP. The render time for such a high resolution took 5-8 minutes per render on a 4060 ti 16GB, with the samples set to 500 and other settings at default. One setting to remember is that under ‘Denoise’ in the render sampling settings, always remember to turn on ‘Use GPU’. This brings the denoising time down from 10-15 seconds just to a second, which is very useful in renders. I also turn on ‘Persistent Data’ which saves a lot of time for animations however it’s not that important for renders.
The lighting was quite difficult and was a meticulous process. I gave each part it’s own lighting, and that required 25-55 lights per camera angle. I used the light wrangler addon which helped me give feathering to the lights and also enabled me to use HDRI lights.
Texturing these watches was the least time consuming, as I basically just gave it a simple Metallic BSDF without any ‘photorealistic’ materials because I was going for the ultra clean metallic render look. For the dial, hands, and time markers I gave them some ambient occlusion to add more depth. On some of the edges of the watch, I used a gradient node with a colour ramp to create some reflections which would be too time consuming to manually create with lights symetrically.
The modelling part of this was very time-consuming too. I used Blender + FreeCAD for it. The client sent me a CAD model of the bracelet and case, however it had sharp edges and the case needed some significant changes along with creating the knob. Another huge issue was that the edges from the CAD model were sharp, and one thing that I’ve learned is that if you want nice renders of metal objects, you need bevelled edges. As you might already know, importing a CAD model into Blender will first need an extreme amount of retopology to be able to even partially bevel it, therefore I bevelled most of it in FreeCAD. However, some edges were left out and I had to bevel them in Blender. I modelled the dial in Blender and modelled the hands in FreeCAD since it’s much easier to model it in there (even though I have around 5 years of experience in Blender compared to a few days of experience in FreeCAD). Anyway, everything else was made completely in Blender and then I exported the renders to Photoshop for a bit of touchup.
I would love to have some feedback on these renders!