June 25, 2012 8:00 AM

by Editor in Chief

How good Blender can be for product visualization? What is required for a quality render fit for professional use? The stories of this week's select artists (listed by alphabetical order) have revealed some of the answers.

My name is Eduard Härkönen, a graphic designer from Finland. I Started modeling and rendering in Blender from January 2012.

My work "Chronograph" was inspired by a Tag Hauers watch. I used in this project many of Blender's modeling tools, such as mirror, array, solidify, curve and noticed that the modeling in Blender is very enjoyable, and I like it very much. I have decided to use textures in a few places instead of modeling for example, in the clock panels and edges of the clock. Because I am used a Blender only a few months and at the beginning there were problems with the modeling workflow.

For rendering, I used only one HDRI map in Cycles--Blender's new excellent render engine. Texturing is very simple for this scene, only metal shaders with bump maps and alpha maps.

I would like to thank the developers for this great software. 

I worked as a photographer for many years, though I always had a passion for cinema, so when I first discovered Blender my first thought was film making. Since then however, I have been drawn more and more towards photo-real rendering and 

have been exploring external renderers like Yafaray, Indigo, Luxrender V-Ray.

Being able to render straight into Blender's compositor opens up a range of post production possibilities, and with Blender's API opening up, it will hopefully expose external renderers to even more features, to allow the artist greater flexibility and control. 

Product rendering can be regarded as a branch of portraiture, and for this render and I wanted to simulate a low key studio lighting set up, and choose to portray the fridge as a monolithic sculpture. I used two lights, one at either side, to highlight the curved edges, then added some bloom, lens distortion and colour correction with Blender's compositor. The fridge uses a Yafaray Blend material, mixing Glossy and Coated Glossy to allow great flexibility with defining the specular reflection. There is also an HDR environment image to provide reflections, though for this particular render the environment provides no illumination.

My name is Javier Vallecillos, I live in Spain and I have been using blender for 2 years and a half. I am a computer engineer interested in video-games and digital art.

I like the cartoon-realistic style for my renders.

 

I want to do a realistic render of a  sport car in a country region. It took 3 hours aprox to render on Luxrender. This work has a lot of modeling and and bit of post- processing. The ilumation is a free HDRI downloaded from www.hdri-locations.com and 3 ilumination planes. There is also a little post-production work made with Photoshop.

Related Links:

1. http://www.hdri-locations.com/

2. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?229619-Mercedes-Coupe-SuperClass-E-2009.-Luxrender&highlight

3. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?257599-Fridge-

4. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?257711-Chronograph

5. http://www.blendernation.com/2012/06/15/chronograph/

6. http://www.luxrender.net

7. http://www.yafaray.org/