Struggling with flatness

[JoshASharp]

Hi all,

I've been doing a lot of white mfmdf renderings for catalogues and really struggling to make them not look flat/rendered, could anyone give me any pointers? the red sections on the top should probably have more shadow around them because they are separate from the main table top and raise up/down.

Thanks all,

Josh

[mattjgerard]

Do you have any real world images for reference? Having images of the style you are going for works wonders for troubleshooting images.
What is your lighting scheme?
Flatness usually indicates non-reflective surfaces and flat low contrast HDRI's.

What is the intended use?

[JoshASharp]

Hi Matt,

thanks for taking the time to respond, intended use is for a few catalogue shots with white backgrounds so I suppose there might not be much I can do with this render in fairness. I'm using a default 3 panel lighting set up because when I tried some of the dosch hdris they were washing out the white tops and very difficult to separate from background? I tried lowering brightness of scene but just made the tops grey rather than white. The default studio panel set ups helped me lift it form

Thanks!

Josh

[mattjgerard]

I haven't watched this one, but it is on my list about rendering white on white-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_AlZjm36iI

[Eric Summers]

Yeah, white on white is tough. Here is another approach you can try:

https://blog.keyshot.com/2016/improve-white-product-renderings-with-keyshots-color-gradient-texture

I use the Dosch HDRIs and just add pins to cover the areas that are blowing things out. Just set the Blend Mode on the pin to Alpha. I try to go for a neutral grey, not too dark but enough to knock back the highlight.

[mattjgerard]

And remember you can use the HDRI editor and pins to subtract light as well. Change the color of the pins to dark grey or black to act as a flag for the HDRI and flag off parts of the light to shape it to what you need. The old codgers call it "negative lighting" . I use that method all the time to shape reflections in lenses and such.

Edit: Dang Eric beat me to it!

[JoshASharp]

Thanks a lot for all the responses guys, tried the negative lighting and that helped a lot, I think the nature of them being white melamine panels and shot on a white background its going to be hard to make it look much better.

Checked out the video too pretty helpful, I've started using a faint hue of light blue as well and that seems to help, rather than just looking grey has a bit more too it which I think is as best I can do.

[Eric Summers]

It is definitely a challenge. It took me a while to get to something I was happy with (and I'll forever be tweaking things) but you'll get the hang of it! The little bit of color is probably pretty helpful.

I watched Esben's tutorial too and no surprise, it was very helpful. Thanks for the link Matt!

[mattjgerard]

Thanks a lot for all the responses guys, tried the negative lighting and that helped a lot, I think the nature of them being white melamine panels and shot on a white background its going to be hard to make it look much better.

Checked out the video too pretty helpful, I've started using a faint hue of light blue as well and that seems to help, rather than just looking grey has a bit more too it which I think is as best I can do.

And remember you can always go into a photo editor and get rid of the blue hue, desaturate it and it will turn grey, but still be visible as some sort of shading.