I’m modeling in Blender for around 2 years and can now model about everything I need without much problem …
But when it comes to rendering technics, textures, materials etc… ( everything that is not modeling ) I’m completely our of the run …
So, I ask you please if you could point me to some tutorials or PDF’s/lessons, to learn from the early beginning how to use materials and rendering techniques at best to obtain photorealistic renders.
I know here there are plenty of stuff going on behind the scene … using nodes, cycle engine etc. But I don’t really know what exactly Cycle engine is, the advantages/inconvenient in respect of Blender default engine etc
After opening the Gold shaders in Blender 2.70, I found myself totally lost and unable to do anything, even by copying same values to a new scene with my already modeled medal, I couldn’t get anything looks like that.
Any ideas where to start from, to properly understand and master ( or at least try to ) all major techniques to have photorealistic renders ?
OP - can you post the results (renders) you did get - then it’ll give us a starting point to advise.
As RickyBlender states - the lighting and the background can often be as important as the material itself - especially when dealing with reflective materials.
In that specific image - there also looks to be some compositing using the glare node in particular.
You can try Metal-KN in my NodePack. It is an accurate Formula for Metal, including Gold. Just use it as Color. (This Setup itself is not made by me, i just extended it with more Metal-Values)
I think the key to a good gold or silver material is the lighting that is reflected off the gold or silver object. if you google “photography studio HDRI” you will get multiple lighting setups you can use and an environmental lighting texture.
I tried them all, gave the nodepack a try and also tried various presets of " elbrujodelatribu "'s gold shader pack. With no satisfying results, I decided to seriously look at it this morning, with some video tutorials etc … I finally thought I had my settings ok and launched the render which loaded for around 9 hours before freezing the PC ( all that ended in a BSOD ). That wasn’t really a loss as I did not achieved my goal.
I feel really sorry and embarrassed of asking you to do this but I have no other solution, as I said, I investigated the matter and it’s a huge world on it’s own ( photorealistic rendering and lightning techniques ) and I truly don’t have the time to learn all that …
If you can’t or don’t want I truly understand, but I know there are a lot of geniuses here who wouldn’t need even 10 minutes to reach that.
That was THE easy solution I was looking for ! After installing sIBL GUI and appropriate Blender Python script, and a quick hour of trying different scenes and fine tuning parameters, I finally achieved what I was looking for.
This is exactly what you guys talked about earlier. Pre-made presets of sceneries and lightning environment ( http://www.hdrlabs.com/gallery/flashpanos.html ) the GUI is simply the little app that manage those " themes ". Then the script as a Python add on that has to be installed in Blender, where it does run a local server which communicate with the sIBL GUI ( preset manager ) so you can instantly load any preset and see the result directly into Blender ( link via the local server ). That is very handy !
But you do realize that you can browse and load .hdr and .exr files directly within Blender, without using an external app and that scripting mumbo-jumbo?
