I’ve been using blender for a few months now and finally feel confident enough in my abilities to have some critique of my work. I’m currently working on still images and trying to make them look as realistic as possible. I have only been using Cycles rendering for about a couple of weeks now, so please tell me what you think. This is my version of a martini. I do know that the image is a little grainy due to number of samples rendered (only 500, my computer is slow). I’m getting some weird reflections from the olives, but I think it’s coming from the surface of the liquid.
First of all. You have to learn about nice composition, you have grey background with is quiitee bad. Would be nice like almost totaly white+shadow of the glass or totaly black (almost) and on the top some nice typography, name of drink or somethink like that you can do even some extra fruits near bottom of the glass.
I agree it’s a bit boring to look at. I’ll see about creating a better environment and better lighting. Perhaps in the next couple of days I’ll have something better submit. Thanks for the advise!
Your modeling is good! And considering you’re new to Blender, your lighting isn’t bad. Technically, as long as I can see distinct highlights, shadows, and midtones, your lighting isn’t bad… but sure, there’s always room to improve.
Whenever you set up lights to illuminate transparent objects, it’s important to remember this; You don’t put light on the subject, you put it on the environment around it. The relective and refractive properties of the material will take care of the rest, in terms of defining the forms. So play around with how to light an environment around the martini glass. Experiment with light intensities and colors, and falloff.
This may help: http://strobist.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-photograph-water-drops-with-one.html
Thanks for the input and suggestions about lighting. I was already using environmental lighting, but have added light red and light blue side lighting to see if that can make it more interesting. The focus for the lights is behind and to the side of the glass. I like the shadows that were created, but found that I had to render to 5000 samples to eliminate most of the artifacts. There are still a few, but I’m ok with that (for now). I tried using No Caustics, but that didn’t seem to help. Any further comments or critiques are always welcome. I know I didn’t add any thing further to the scene to make it more interesting, but for the moment I’m working on gettting a better grasp on the lighting. I hope you like the results.
