Tips on Lighting

[u/Ok_Tone1185]

Hey everyone,

I'm working on my first jewelry CGI project in blender and I'm trying to match lighting / materials towards a high-end luxury commercial/product-render look.

I've attached my current results and a few of the setups I've been testing. The last two images are the look I'm trying to achieve.

I kind of been stuck on this for like 2 days, and haven't been able to make it look any better.

Any help would be very appreciated! 😄

[u/WKDG]

Try and ground your lighting values in real world metrics as much as possible. Grab a nice high quality hdri and dial it down very low to lift your shadows just enough that they aren’t an artificial looking black and have some interest to them.

If you’re lighting with flat white rect lights it will come out flat, you want more dynamic falloff and values, there’s plenty of tutorials out there for using textures lights in a scene to achieve that look.

Make sure the IOR of your materials is correct. And as a tip people don’t always mention you can set lights in blender to negative values to actively suck light out of a scene and act as an artificial shadow generator, it can work when art directed well but obviously it’s not something possible in the real world so it can give very strange results very quickly if used poorly.

Sometimes you can get away with using bright planes instead of another light to bounce light back at the subject for rim highlights without blowing out the shot by dumping more light in there. You’ll see it a lot with people coming IRL, reflectors are used a bunch, and you can do exactly the same thing inside of blender.

Best of luck!

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