The Renderer's Rings

[WytRaven]

Hi guys a little WIP designed to make the new machine work for it's money.

The idea is to make a masculine ring with a rendering theme. Think mythical/fantasy enchanted rings but instead of being a ring of great arcane power it's meant to be a ring of rendering power... Ok so I'm not doing a very good job of describing what I'm trying to do so just check out the test render.

There are 372 diamonds in this scene all using my "real diamond" material which is available in the material database and the stones are fashioned in the classic "brilliant" cut. I also used the Emerald (cpfresh), Ruby (joegiampaoli), and Sapphire (cpfresh) materials from the DB. I think the sapphire looks about how it should but the ruby and emerald materials didn't perform as expected especially considering the three feature stones are cut with a design that is meant to be perfect for emeralds.

Overall I'm not entirely happy with the design. The double ring "minimalistic" setup I am happy with (based on my wedding ring which is a double ring setup of titanium and gold). It's the mounting for the diamonds in particular that I think I could have done much better. I think I need to use the silver to better effect by introducing faceting in the ring itself to further enhance the diamonds. I also intend to dirty it up a bit with some fine scratch and dirt maps (note: I really hate UV unwrapping ).

Comments appreciated.

This was rendered at 2560x1600 with 2 x supersampling for 25 hours. It reached ~12000 samples per pixel in that time.

RenderersRings1.jpg (291.9 KiB) Viewed 6967 times

[PureSpider]

Wow I love the ring design!
Got inspired by it... may I use it as a base for my own next ring design?

[WytRaven]

Wow I love the ring design!
Got inspired by it... may I use it as a base for my own next ring design?

No worries

[Polinalkrimizei]

Wow. Nice rings.
And 372 diamonds is just nuts. I made ONE in the simple renderings thread using your material (thanks for sharing! ) and it took forever to solve. If you ever get tired of your machine (well, during the next years), I wouldnt' mind at all to use it myself...
One minor crit: The "inner edges", the ones that touch the finger, need a little more bevelling IMO. They say that marriage hurts sometimes but no need to hurt from the beginning!

[Nick]

Fantastic rings, compliment

[tungee]

Very nice and clean work!
Congrats Wyt!

Has Vray Dispersion? Hehehehehe

[dakiru]

Hi guys a little WIP designed to make the new machine work for it's money.

Those are very very nice!
My wife liked them too I feel we will have to visit jewelery store soon

[WytRaven]

I've been doing some research on macro photography and in particular macro photography as applied to jewelry. So my task this weekend is to implement a technique generally known as the floating glass technique.

The idea is that you place your subject on a sheet of glass and place behind that at some distance a coloured material to provide your background. This gives a shadowless semi-reflected look and prevents the background colour from contaminating the subject's own natural colours. In addition to this physical setup I will be attempting to setup a lighting scheme utilising a diffused flash and dim ambience.

The image above was created with a massively over powered HDR environment map for lighting which isn't correct at all.

I will post some results and discussion as I make progress.

Depending on how much trouble the scene setup gives me I may actually get to do some modeling rework on the ring itself. I have begun to suspect that the problem with the emerald and ruby materials are with my unrealistic lighting and the cut of the gems rather than the materials themselves.

[PureSpider]

Can you post a close up wire of the sockets of your diamonds please?
If possible, a cut section from the side with the diamonds in would be best!

[WytRaven]

Can you post a close up wire of the sockets of your diamonds please?
If possible, a cut section from the side with the diamonds in would be best!

Here you go. It's probably easier to explain it through. Each socket is basically a copy of the diamond scaled up ever so slightly which then has it's top faces removed, normals inverted, and is then stitched into the surrounding mesh with a little manual face building.

I haven't gotten around to it yet but as you can see from this the diamond's front faces are out and proud of the ring surface however I think a much better effect would be achieved by sinking them deeper into the ring and using the faceted silver to further bounce light around...it's on the todo list

DiaRingCrossSection.jpg (277.54 KiB) Viewed 6609 times

[PureSpider]

Here you go. It's probably easier to explain it through. Each socket is basically a copy of the diamond scaled up ever so slightly...

Thats what I wanted to know. I didn't scale the sockets any and my diamonds show weird reflections.
Working on this atm
Thank you!

May I ask how big your diamonds are and what your ray nudge distance is, as opposed to the distance of the diamonds to your sockets?

[WytRaven]

May I ask how big your diamonds are and what your ray nudge distance is, as opposed to the distance of the diamonds to your sockets?

The diamonds are 1.2 mm in diameter and the distance between the stones and their sockets would be measured in micrometers I would guess. It's to small for me to be able to actually give you a distance. All I can say is that they are "floating" within their sockets. There is no intersection between diamond and socket.

The ray nudge is blendigo default: 0.00001

[PureSpider]

Hm if the distance is in µm then you can aswell leave them intersecting because of the ray nudge distance of 0.1mm, right?
Just thinking...

[WytRaven]

I knew you were going to say that To be honest I simply don't know the distance except to say that it is small. I'll try with a smaller nudge and some point and see if it makes any difference.

One other thing I just remembered...I also used a cast modifier (cylinder) on the vertices that make up the lip of the socket to bring them in line with the curvature of the ring.

Also if it isn't already obvious I only modeled one vertical line of 3 diamond sockets and the tiny bit of ring they cover and then used an array modifier to arrange and then "applied" it and did a "remove doubles" to get rid of superfluous vertices. It didn't work perfectly, as can be seen be some artifacts at one point in the original image. I will do that better when I remodel the silver ring with better sockets.

[WytRaven]

Ok so here's the first and probably last test of the floating glass technique.

Things I've learnt from this experiment:

• The technique definitely works and indigo can be trusted to reproduce the effect perfectly
• This is a very inefficient way to perform jewelry photography (from a rendering perspective)
• Macro photography is difficult to achieve by rendering when staying true to world scale (due to DoF or perspective distortion issues)
• Single "flash" light assisted by diffusers in combination with an EXR environment map works well but takes time to get right
• My suspicions about the feature gem colours being tied to inaccurate lighting seem to have been correct. The emerald and sapphire definitely look much like expected whereas the ruby is just starting to look like it's a pink rather than reddish type. Gimme garnets any day for red stones.

I have attached a reference photo of this technique being used for real.

The technique is inefficient due to the fact that the double reflection caused by this technique is not particularly desirable but is also cause for much of the rendering time. I accidentally turned off the glass transparency during a test render and the result is far more pleasing in a fraction of the time (the glass effectively became like a polished black tile).

Macro photography is hard to get right. If you get too close you have serious trouble getting enough DoF while keeping F Stop realistic. It's very easy to end up with the field of actual focus being only a millimeter or two in depth. The way to fix that is pull the camera back and zoom in instead but this has an undesirable effect also, namely flattening of perspective. The best way to get around this is to pull back, zoom in as much as you can without causing flattening and then crop the result to get your final framed image. In traditional photography that isn't such a problem but in indigo that means rendering at very high resolution and then region rendering at the actual res you want your image to be. My attempt at doing that resulted in an indigo crash as the res I was trying to render at was 5120 x 3200 with a 2560 x 1600 region 2 x sup-sample, and 2 light layers. I'm not sure what caused the crash but it's the first I've had with indigo on mac.

The flash and ambience lighting method does work well but takes quite a bit of playing around to get right. I still don't think I had quite achieved "right" in this image but I was getting close. This is with all parameters within realistic real world limits. The most difficult thing has been the Luminous Flux of the flash which is more or less a trial and error process at this point. I started at around 5000 lumens and ended up down at 3000 for this shot.

This render used the following camera settings:

• Film ISO: 50
• Exposure: 1/2 sec
• F-Stop: 22
• The camera is 29cm from the subject centre

I stopped this at ~14.5K samples per pixel and it still had a long way to go in clearing up in the reflections. It's been cropped a little but no other post pro used. I also attached a screen grab showing scene setup.

FloatGlassRen.jpg (153.11 KiB) Viewed 6496 times

FloatGlassRef.jpg (53.1 KiB) Viewed 6494 times

FloatGlassSce.jpg (62.55 KiB) Viewed 6500 times

More or less everything in the scene is an off white colour (~0.75 RGB) with the exception of the glass (N-SF57 from Schott Glass Catalogue) and the "background which is near black.