Beginners question...sorry..

[mb976]

Hi All

Firstly apologies for the generic beginners questions....

A bit of background info, we are glass blowers who specialise in making pendant lights (http://www.rothschildbickers.com)
We have many options in our line and are looking for ways to visualise all of the options, traditionally we have used product photos.
We have all of our products modeled in Sketchup which we use in how for simple visualisations to show clients how the light will look in their spaces.

I have been trialing Keyshot to see if it will be a good fit to allow us to render all of the options in house, but have been struggling to get the glass looking realistic...
I have attached a existing studio photo and our model for reference...

I am wondering if it possible to commission someone to setup the materials (glass/metal/flex/fringe) and the environment/lighting for us to then run the entire product line through a bulk render?

Any help or guidance would be much appreciated...eager to learn as I really like the software, it seems more intuitive than any other renderer we have trialed...

Cheers

Mark

[DriesV]

Hi,

Firstly, after having browsed your website for a wee bit... Wow, what a great collection of lamps.

Secondly, KeyShot is perfectly capable of visualizing your various designs.

For rendering glass, there are two key ingredients: sufficient ray bounces, and lighting.
You need a sufficiently high amount of ray bounces to give the refractions depth and to make them look realistic. The lighting (HDRI and/or physical lights) needs to be set up, so that the reflections and refractions in the lamp materials look interesting.

There are many highly capable freelance CG artists and designers who use KeyShot as their primary visualization tool and who would be happy to kickstart your KeyShot workflow.
To list a few examples:
Esben Oxholm
Magnus Skogsfjord
Will Gibbons
Richard Funnell

Welcome to the forum! :-)

Dries

[mb976]

@driesv Excellent..thank you very much for your comments and help...I hope with a lot of perseverance that our rendering can match our glassblowing

I will look into the amount of ray bounces with my tests, I do like the way that KS gives immediate feedback on what the HDRI is doing to the scene.
Do you recommend HDRI or physical lights for a studio representative setup?

I have come across a few of the guys you have listed in my research for this project, totally amazing work... I do wonder if I am better off bringing in a pro to get us going rather than me blathering around in the virtual dark!

Thanks again for the welcome

[DriesV]

If you want to render the lamps by themselves (i.e. not integrated into an actual interior model), then I believe HDRIs will be perfectly fine.
There is a lot of flexibility in the HDRI Editor for making custom environments for your lamp designs.

Dries

[DriesV]

So my suggestion would be to spend some time learning the ins and outs of the HDRI Editor: how to set highlights, use images as Pins, use gradients etc. ;-)

Dries