Best Renders I have ever seen!

[Ed]

Looks great Chad.  Two passes seems to be the trick to bring out the best of the stone and the metal shank on these rings.  How many ray bounces?

Ed

[Chad Holton]

Looks great Chad.  Two passes seems to be the trick to bring out the best of the stone and the metal shank on these rings.  How many ray bounces?

Ed

Thanks Ed.  Ray bounces were @ 25.
Yes - I think so too. It's just easier to focus on each material with jewelry. Though, I still need to work on blending the passes together and the ground needs to be darker.. I think.

[hitesh.m]

Here's my 2nd submission.

I added a physical light in front of the ring.  This gave highlights on the smaller diamonds, regardless of HDR position.  In other words, the physical light makes the "sweet spot" in the HDR less critical.  The physical light also gives a better defined shadow which plants the ring better in the scene.

As Chad suggested, the large diamond, small diamonds, and ring shank were optimized using two different HDRs and settings.  The three passes were combined in Photoshop.  In PS I tweaked the curves and saturation of each layer until I was satisfied with the matching of the layers.  Of course if this were a project I was going to publish, I'd work up multiple versions of each pass to get better matching.

I'm not a photo retoucher by any means.  I like to get renders in one pass with a minimum of post work if possible.  In this case, if you're going for a particular look, then multiple passes is probably the way to go.

Your reference image is at the bottom.  The big unknown with the reference is how much post work was done.  A lot of variables if you're going for an exact match.

Ed

2nd image diamond looking very good what setting & enviornment u have use for this output.

[Ed]

Hitesh -

I used the following for this image:

Conference Room HDR tilted and de-saturated to 10% in the HDR Editor for the diamonds.

A black & white HDR for the ring shank.  Many of the B&W studio HDRs work fine.  I prefer one with soft edges - I think it looks more natural than sharp edges.

A 60 watt area light in front of the ring (un-check visible to the eye) gives better ground shadow definition and highlights to the small stones.

The Conference Room HDR alone does a good job, but the B&W HDR makes the ring shank reflections more simple and smooth.

Post work in Photoshop mainly consisted of adjusting saturation (less color saturation) and adjusting Curves.

Experimentation is the best teacher

Ed

[Chad Holton]

Another try (same environments as before):

[DriesV]

Trying to match the cam of Chad's latest attempt (nice image btw!).
Same HDRI as my previous renders.

1st image: Straight out of KeyShot. No postwork.
2nd image: Some curve edits and blending in Photoshop.

Dries

[feher]

First of all I would like to say great images from everyone who has done this.
I must admit this was tough for me. One I do not know what makes a good diamond. So lighting this was tough.
I too went with the conference room dome as my starting point.
I am happy with this image.
I will go back to vehicles now. They cause me less issues.....lol
Tim

[Ed]

Very nice job Tim.  Yeah - jewelry has it's own challenges.

Did you use a clown pass to tweak sections independently?

Ed

[guest84672]

Great work from all of you. Thanks so much for the support.

[evilmaul]

wow last few renders ffrom a bunch of you guys are just so gorgeous...well done all.

[feher]

Very nice job Tim.  Yeah - jewelry has it's own challenges.

Did you use a clown pass to tweak sections independently?

Ed

Hi Ed,
That was one render for the most part. I did do another just for the band in one section. I'll post the raw render tonight so you can see the difference between the two.
Talking with a few photographers they say diamonds are a bear and alot of photoshop is envolved to get those images.
Trust me when I say a lot of photoshop was NOT envolved in my image. I played with lighting for a day. I wasn't planing on doing that. I thought two seconds and I would have this lite ...lol  I was wrong...lol I kept telling myself let the software work for you  so I kept at it.
Having the word Bunkspeed dropped didn't help. That made me more determain to do this with one shot.
Tim

[Jeff Hayden]

You guys are killing it. Thanks again for all of your support. I don't think that Diamond has any idea what a superstar consultant crew he is getting advice from.

[DriesV]

You guys are killing it. Thanks again for all of your support. I don't think that Diamond has any idea what a superstar consultant crew he is getting advice from.

It's quite remarkable that even with us all using the same model and adhering +/- to 'jewelry presentation conventions', the mood of each image is quite unique.
Still waiting on (an) image(s) from the topic starter though...

Dries

[fario]

I will go back to vehicles now. They cause me less issues.....lol

hahaaah excellent!

---

my example with caustic enabled.

Antoine

[DriesV]

Hi Antoine,

I can't see any caustics in your image...
Did you insert a ground plane?
Try a ground plane with some roughness and pick a bright enough background color.

Dries