Rings

[Zander85]

More Progress.

[guest84672]

Very cool - nice work.

[Ed]

Zander -

Lots of progress - looking good.  Looks like you got the HDRLS backdrop and lighting working together well.

The one thing I would change is the sharp inside edge on the #2 ring model.  It doesn't scream "Buy Me!"

Is the ground reflection from the KeyShot built-in function?

I see some lens flare and glint on the stones.  After Effects?

Did you find a solution for adding glint on the stones for animation?

Ed

[Zander85]

Actually Ed I really appreciate how you have paid my work attention and stuck bye me while I made progress. I agree with you about ring two. The third ring is the newest one and a co-worker smoothed the model by hand for me which just makes it look beautiful in the render. (I need to re-smooth the other two models and do it right like the third model). It also sped up the render time a lot (went from 4 days to 11 hours for a spin after the intersecting geometry was removed) because he cleaned up the geometry and made sure there was not much intersecting geometry. The reflection is the built in Keyshot reflection but I helped make it look nicer by making a nice dark vignette in photoshop and layered that on top of the renders in After Effects. The lens flare was created using the "optical flares" plugin from Video Copilot (After Effects plugin). The lighting was done with HDR Light Studio (no backplate was used). I simply positioned the lights in a way that they would not show up in the background of my fixed camera position. The pipeline I have developed is excellent. It takes minutes to swap out one ring model with another render and then swap out the renders in After Effects and create a movie in there. Here is a link to the youtube channel for Marks Jewelers. It has a few of the animations up there. I think the optical flares really help make the renders more exciting and helps differentiate my renders from the rest of the crowd. Thank you for the feed back fellas.

[Ed]

Zander  -

I checked out your YouTube ring animations - they are quite good.  Will they soon appear on the main jewelry site?

I've tended to stay away from the KeyShot built-in ground reflection feature, but the fall-off you added makes it a lot more realistic.

As far as the glint in the stones - is "optical flares" doing that automatically?  Or do you have to manually place the flares in location and timeline?

Ed

[Zander85]

The you tube videos will eventually be on the Marks Jewelers website (we have some big plans in the works). The optical flare plugin has the ability to track luminance values so I simply render out a black and white version of the rings and then import those in After Effects and set them above the layer with my regular renders and I set the blending mode to screen. That way the flares follow the diamonds. I was getting too much flaring in the center of the rings so I managed to mask those out as well.

Thanks for the feed back guys.