How to make my ring look like metal

[ad19]

Hi Everyone,

I'm having some trouble with rendering precious metals (platinum) using my keyshot 6 demo software. More specifically, I'm having trouble with making my metal look metallic and shinny. I'm attaching a screen shot of my most recent render along with a picture of my Hdri. Any advice will be greatly appreciative.

[Will Gibbons]

Looks shiny to me! I think you need to be more specific in what you want. See how the reflections look soft? The metal, being highly specular, is reflecting the HDRI exactly as-is. The falloff on the pins may be making your ring look rough. Try reducing the falloff so the pins aren't so soft. That should give you some hard edges to reflect in the ring. That should be more descriptive of the surface contour. As for metallic... usually high-contrast is what you want, and it looks to me like you've got that one already.

[DMerz III]

When I light my metallic surfaces using the HDRI, I stay away from using the falloff mode 'from edge'. This has made all of your 'softboxes' have an unrealistically soft falloff, which is great for creating gradient shapes on your surface, but in reality, light in a softbox falls off way differently.

Here's my advice. Try using falloff mode of 'circular' and setting the amount to 1 as a starting point. See if that helps. Otherwise, as Will said, please provide some example of what you're shooting for so we can help get you closer!

[ad19]

Thx guys for your quick and detailed responses.

I will take your guys advice and re-work my hdri and post what I get soon.

The biggest problem I'm facing is rendering a picture that looks like authentic polished metal (platinum). I posted a picture of a authentic polished ring to help better describe what I'm looking for. (I apologize for the poor quality of the picture)

My problem is that the metal in my rendering looks nothing like the metal in my picture. It seems as if my ring rendering is consisted of pure black and white reflections where the authentic ring consists of much more. My question then becomes, how can I reproduce this authentic looking metal in my black and white Hdri?
I hope this helps clear up my original post from yesterday. I'm going to try what you both suggested and will circle back in a few days.

Thx again for the help.   

[mattjgerard]

From what I've gathered from reading these and other forums about metals, is that the metal is the product of your environment. So, if your metal doesn't look right, there is just as much of a chance that it is the HDRI, lights, etc of the environment as it would be the metal settings themselves. You need to dissect the reference image down to each reflection and negative light and figure out how that detail got there. There are a load of people on this forum that are great at metals, but I would suggest to find some high quality reference images, and really study them to see where the highlights hit, is there a color cast to some reflection, where are the dark areas and such.

[DMerz III]

Exactly what Mattjgerard is hinting at. Polish metal or any highly reflective surface is reliant on the environment, almost 100%.

What you see in your photograph is the ring reflecting literally EVERYTHING around it. Starting with the lights...the lights in that room are definitely not white softboxes in a completely blacked out studio, and most likely the light temperature of those lights are not 100% white, they're probably tungsten, etc, which is where the 'yellowish' cast comes from. It's reflecting the ground it is sitting on, it's reflecting the light that's bouncing from your shirt, from your workshop, from everywhere. So if you're going for realism in that sense, your best start would be an actual HDR of an actual space.

Hope that puts things in perspective a little bit. Lighting/Environment is everything when you're dealing with a material that relies on it so heavily for its appearance.

- D. Merz

[Speedster]

You can also add a vertical plane, just out of the camera's sightline, and drop any appropriate .jpg image on it.  This will then reflect on your metal.  You will have to tweak the exact position of the plane.
Bill G

[texax]

Besides in need of more complex environment reflection, preferably some real life environment image planes on top of the softbox HDRI, color is the other distinction that will make look your jewelry more attractive to the eye. You can always desaturate the environment reflection in post but please do not black and white it. Silver or Platinum is never black and white, you can shoot it like that in soft box HDRI but it's completely unnatural and ends up looking artificial or clinical.

From my experience you need to add some color spectrum gradients especially with yellow and blue hues taking the most space in the spectrum, drop the green magenta and blue-purples completely but leave a little bit of red and cyan on the ends of the gradient. Just remember to go very subtly with the color, make the effect almost invisible to the eye and while the color is not going to be obvious it will make it warmer to the viewer's eye and drop that clinical hardware look of a metal screw shot on top of the white background. You can achieve this effect in either KS or in PS post, it doesn't really matter how. You can have one side of the ring warmer and the other one cooler, that's very effective if the ring is shot in perspective. But once again make it very subtle.

White is never white and silver is never silver 

[DriesV]

For metals the appearance is indeed going to be hugely dependent on the lighting (mostly HDRI) used.

That being said, metals in reality do in fact show color shifts depending on wavelength and viewing angle, and also have stronger coloring in reciprocal reflections.
The Metal material in KeyShot 6 doesn't do that.
In KeyShot 7, the Metal material has been enhanced to have presets for common metals (silver, platinum, gold, aluminum etc.) that simulate this complex behavior using measured data.

I think this will be a great feature for jewelry designers/visualizers.
I attached two KeyShot 7 renderings: one is a simple grey color, the other uses the 'silver' preset. Both images use the same B/W studio HDRI.

Dries

[DMerz III]

Ouuuuu, this is great. Very excited for KS7