This is my first WIP and I’m posting to try to get some assistance as I put this together. I’ve been reading these forums for a long time and I’ve finally stopped being lazy and decided to begin my first scene.
What I’m trying to do is to have a nice rose in a glass vase displayed on a white background. I’ll tackle one problem at a time, so the first thing is obviously with the lighting/environment.
I’m over-exposing slightly and I’d like to over-expose even more to get the white background whiter. The obvious problem with the vase is that it is mostly invisible against the white background. I’ve tried all kinds of different lighting and even tried colouring the glass, but even with a colour tint the outline of the vase stays fairly invisible while the tint seems to appear inside. For the finished vase I’d rather just have it as clear glass - the scene is meant to be simplistic but aesthetically nice.
I’ll try to work things out for myself as much as I can and I’ll post when I get stuck. Thanks in advance for any help.
It almost looks as though your vase normals are flipped the wrong way for a start.
Secondly, try creating a wall or box as your backdrop and set it to white and “shadeless”. This way you won’t have to overexpose the rest of the scene. You may have to work to hide the edge of the table though, but you could extend it to beyond the backdrop
Note however that the glass will refract/reflect white, white, white - which may make it seem a little boring
I’ve filled the vase up with water now. I might have made the surface tension of the water a little bit high, but it might be ok. Next step is leaves for the rose cutting. Ideally I’d like to make the grey looking background closer to pure white without making the glass vase disappear. Changing yafray exposure makes the background white but makes the vase disappear.
Your glass vase must be also reflective. Maybe you should add some reflection and something to reflect, like an Environment map.
For this image, I did not use env maps, but I put two big white panels so as they are reflected.
It’s something I’ve seen they do sometimes in photography studios.
EDIT : oh your vase SEEMS indeed to be reflective, sorry. But in your case you could try and add black or grey panels so they are reflected.
As per Goosey’s suggestion, I made a backdrop with a white/shadeless wall, and I also set it’s emit value to 1. It still turns out an ugly off-white, and the only way it seems to turn out pure white is with yafray over-exposure which makes the vase invisible. I appreciate the help so far, and I appreciate suggestions which can make a pure white backdrop whilst maintaining visibility of the vase.
Not much more to report except I’m happier with the lighting. I found the preset of ‘clear glass’ doesn’t seem to reflect. Fresnel offset has to be lowered below 5. There may be other settings that help but that’s the only one I could find. I was going to post this yesterday but my site was down for half the day.
The next thing will be the leaves which will stem out for a couple of levels below the rose. Then it’s polishing :).
Here’s an update with some leaves. They look a little bit flat, so I’ll have to look more closely at some real rose pics. The little gaps in the leaf twigs need to be fixed while I’m at it. I’ll try to learn how to give the thorns a gadient colour as-in real-life thorns too.