Drug Vial Product Shot

Drug Vial Product Shot

I was happy with these so I thought I would post them here. The modeling was straight forward, but the renders took a lot of tinkering to get right.

One of the two things that were tricky was the label. I needed to create geometry on the backside so the back of the label was white and not the same (or reverse) as the front. This worked out because it did give the label some thickness which is visible in the render.

The other tricky part was the glass. When I tried to use only HDRI & Radiosity, the glass drops stark shadows (on the backside of the label) as if it is solid. When I use a render tag and uncheck "Visible in Radiosity" it is as if the glass does not exist, and there is no "presence" of the object on the floor plane. My solution was to use 4 area lights (with geometry), 7 samples each with "Raytrace & Trans" setting and use an HDRI tag to enhance reflection, NO Radiosity and add a Caustics tag. Caustics seem a bit chaotic, each render I did was different, sometimes with little "flares" showing up in one render and not in another.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out - Cheers.

Renee,

those renders look amazing. You should be happy with the way they turned out. Everything looks correct to my eye.

And thank you also for sharing the setup of the project as well.

Beautiful work.

PS : also just curious, what Max Ray Depth did you use in the Render settings ?

I ditto Paul P and ZooHead. Your renders are awesome!
Thanks for sharing the particulars of how to solve some of the problems that arose.
They are a great help.

My Best Regards
Jeanny

These are great - really well done!

With caustics, one trick I've used for materials that are both transparent and reflective, like glass, is to render twice, once with the transparency switched off and reflection maxed, and once with the reflection switched off. This way, you are't dividing your photons in some uncontrolled way and can get two predictable renders relatively quickly. You can then blend the two renders (with your choice of opacity, additive or not) to get the best of both worlds.

I cover this in my book — even with ridiculous numbers of photons, trying to get good results from glass reflections in a single pass is a disaster, but with two passes as described above, a modest number of photons gets you good results.

The unpredictable flares come from, say, something being only slightly reflective and thus its reflection caustics having very few samples to work with.

I´d say area lights for soft shadows can´t deliver desirable caustics at all. One needs a considerable sized light source - while the other case the opposite.

Cheers
Frank

Wow simply amazing job.You really are pushing quality out of those renders

Great renders

Great renders Rene66! I also noticed the artifacts when using Caustics. Each render behave differently so I had to run in several times until I get the one I liked.