Black on black silhouette lighting setup

[PhilippeV8]

I am soon going to have to do a render of a product that is painted black, with a black backplate.  To still make the object visible I need to add "highlight" type of lighting to the outer edges to become like a silhouette.  This is often done with products like wine bottles or such.

Anyone can inform me how to setup a HDRI for this, or do I best start with total black HDRI and use the lights inside KS4 ?

[PhilippeV8]

Similar to this shot:

[DriesV]

Hi Philippe,

How I would go about this:
Make a duplicate of your painted object and assign a black velvet material to it. Make sure you have bright (white) sheen and apply a sufficiently high edginess.
Then render out two passes: one with object painted and another with the velvet material.
Finally overlay both passes in Photoshop and put the velvet pass layer to blend mode linear dodge or something with similar effect.

I attached a KeyShot package and 'composited' PSD.

note: this is one application where layered materials inside KeyShot would be very welcome.

Dries

[DriesV]

Here's a matte example.

Dries

[PhilippeV8]

I like the second one .. however ... how did you do the lighting ?

[DriesV]

I like the second one .. however ... how did you do the lighting ?

It's a comped image. The rim lighting is achieved through blending layers in Photoshop. See previously attached zip for the PSD.
Lighting in KeyShot is just an off-the-shelf studio HDRI.

Dries

[Despot]

    

[Pepster3D]

I would start out with a black hdr environment, and then edit it in Keyshot adding rectangular pin lights one by one to get the highlights you want.  Normally I would use HDR Light Studio for that but if you don't have it, then Keyshot's editing is good.

[PhilippeV8]

Pepster, I did just that on friday.  But as soon as I wanted to save the hdri, it crashed.  So I re-did it and it crashed again, but not to desktop, so I re-did what I had, but in Photoshop.
It's rendering a whole bunch over the weekend.  Lets see on monday what I end up with.

[PhilippeV8]

Monday's here and here's my result.

What I did was render out 4 versions with lighting in different places, then take them in Photoshop layers and chose "Lighten" as blending mode.  Then tweaked each layer till I had the lighting that I was looking for.

With this product and as it is, being not very organic, I feel it's almost impossible to get a harder outline lighting .. or I should add bigger fillets to the edges, but it needs to look like the real thing as well ...

Thnx to all those whoom offered help for this !

[NormanHadley]

That looks a fun game - can anyone play? This is Axalta gun metal paint liberally sprayed on every surface and an HDRI with Luxion's conference room turned way down low except for a single spot. No post-KS trickery was involved.

As with the toon shader, it seems Keyshot gets progressively more fun the fewer colours are involved...

[Pepster3D]

PhilippeV8-It's looking nice so far.  I see what you mean and you probably want a few more big highlights on your edges.  If you do a lot of this, then definitely look at HDR Light Studio Pro since it has "Light Paint" in it where you point to where you want a highlight and the lights move accordingly.  It's a huge time saver. Otherwise you can just keep moving pin lights around until you hit the right edges.  Been there, done that a thousand times. 

[DriesV]

...
If you do a lot of this, then definitely look at HDR Light Studio Pro since it has "Light Paint" in it where you point to where you want a highlight and the lights move accordingly.  It's a huge time saver.
...

The KeyShot Pro HDR Editor actually has this functionality as well with its pin lights.

Dries

[PhilippeV8]

If I remember and understand correctly the difference is that with the studio, you point on your object where you want the light (REFLECTION) added, not the environement-map if you will.

Ok, so tuning the hdri in KS is not an option cuz as I mentioned before, it keeps crashing my KS.  Who knows I ever get my new workstation any time soon and maybe that will fix that problem.

No, this is not a kind of project I work on often, so I have no real need for the studio.  The internal editor would do just fine (if it worked).

The idea is this image to be used with the slogan "once you go black, you never go back" for a sister-company that has a very much bright white and clinicaly-clean layout and style otherwise. (Argenta) .. (no Dries, not the bank )

I already made the suggestion of making another render showing the 3 different available sizes of this door-hinge with the slogan "size does matter" :p  The product manager appreciated that suggestion haha 

[Pepster3D]

Oh yeah!  Dur, I didn't even realize that.  Thanks for the heads up.
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The KeyShot Pro HDR Editor actually has this functionality as well with its pin lights.

Dries
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