A sporty auto themed watch designed and created for Harold Pinchbeck using Blender. Designed, modelled, and rendered by Jason Garth Edwards at www.jayargonaut.com. An artistic render with varied lighting.

It Is No secret…it Is a Lot to Do With Good Lighting!🌞💡

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Written by jayargonaut

I like to join in with these WordPress prompts, if I can, though sometimes I admit it is a struggle while trying to keep my blog on point with respect to my 3D art. I am not going to write much in this post, and hopefully let the images speak for themselves; the point being – a lot of what I do in the final render images is down to ‘good lighting’. That is a good skill for me!

All of these renders you see below, I have mesh modelled and rendered using Blender 4.0 creative suite, the tool I always use. It is a watch design I have been working on recently, so these are all renders of essentially the same model, just with different lighting set-ups. I have spent the last few hours running off different renders with several lighting set-ups, to show what small variations can make. See what you think

To achieve the image position I have rotated the watch model back by -15 degrees along the x-axis to the camera, so the lighting primarily accents from the top, giving that down-light effect. The lighting comes from two different sources:

  • Several strategically placed lights, mainly from the upper side and top (if you look carefully there is one placed just above the watch, which lights the top-case and inside-bottom of the dial, for example).
  • A HDRI image – this stands for ‘High Dynamic Range Image’. This is essentially an image that surrounds the model to enable reflected light, that bounces off the model. This is a good way to create realistic lighting. In the above images I have used different HDRI images in all three to get the differing effect (in the second image, for example, you can see the coloured stripes from the HDRI ‘bouncing off’ the watch case to give that cool effect👍).

Though brief, I hope this goes some way to explaining how the above images are essentially achieved. With some thoughtful lighting and careful post-editing, you can achieve great effects and images with your 3D Blender object models.

So when the WordPress prompt asked me:

Daily writing prompt
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
View all responses

My reply to this is: my ‘not-so secret’ today is ‘good lighting’!😊

Have a great day everyone!

Kind regards, Jay

Jayargonaut

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19 Comments

    1. Thank you Laura 😊. You are right, it is such an important part of good imagery, and often overlooked. I forget sometimes, so pay more attention to it these days. Thank you for your positive comments, I sincerely appreciate them 🙏. Kind regards…Jay

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    1. Blender is as you say, a very versatile and fantastic program to use, I think the steep learning curve often puts people off unfortunately. Thank you for your inspiring words Namrata🙏. I sincerely appreciate them! Kind regards…Jay😊

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