Rendering a Light Bulb - feedback

#1

I’m relatively new to Keyshot, having been using it for around three months. One job I’m working on includes a vintage style light bulb, which is looking reasonably good but I know it could be much better.

I can’t quite get the element to glow as I want. I’ve used an area light material and have applied a colour gradient using the view mapping option. I plan to try applying it with UV mapping, once I’ve worked out how to unwrap it. Bloom helps but I haven’t worked out how to make the element glow without blurring the white highlights on the glass (threshold didn’t seem to help).

The glass isn’t great either. I want to give it an amber tint that fades to clear. I’ve tried applying a metal material as a label, controlling the opacity with a gradient. It isn’t really working. How can I add a gradient colour to the glass?

Many thanks for any suggestions.

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#2

I think that is a really nice render personally… The lighting on the metal area gives a nice dramatic look.

#3

Thanks very much, Trevor. I am quite happy with the render but know it could be better - I guess everyone feels that way when they’re learning!

#4

At this point, its a SUPER clean render. its nearly pixel perfect, so you need to decide what direction you want to go with it. For more realism, you will need imperfections. if you want more drama, then look at exposure, contrast levels, evaluate the histogram in photoshop or something to see what your distribution of bright/dark areas are. I think the metal on the socket is too dull, if you look at a real bulb, that’s more shiny/reflective with lots of imperfections from manufacturing. You could also start to play with layers, and render parts of the object seperatly and start to learn to comp in photoshop or something like that. Its a great image, and I would suggest a project of ending up with a 3x3 grid of 9 different “looks” for the image, would be a great exercise in visualizing different options for images.

#5

Many thanks for the detailed feedback, Matt. You are absolutely right about the lack of imperfections, I hadn’t even considered that. It’s another aspect of Keyshot I need to study as it really does add to the realism.

I need to work on my lighting in general, and materials (I have Will Gibbons course but haven’t got to the materials yet). My Photoshop is a bit rusty these days so that’s another thing to work on. I have plenty of work to do!

#6

I also really like the visual, it’s clearly a render but looks really nice. Sometimes something really small can already add some realism if it only has the suggestion of not being perfect.

For example with the socket Matt mentions, you could plug a noise texture or marble texture in it’s roughness channel and tweak with the values/scale so you already have subtle differences in the roughness of it. And you could the same for the bump map so you just have tiny scratches.

Things like that you can realise quickly while you could also go into a huge amount of detail by using the 3D paint option, custom textures or software like Substance Painter to get subtle wear. Substance Painter can create wear masks based on the shape of a model which can make it look more natural.

But you could even do such things a bit if you use the simple texture approach and for example use the occlusion texture or curvature texture nodes to mask out the texture you put in for bump/roughness. I always enjoy playing with such things and especially if you don’t need real closeups it doesn’t have to be that complicated to achieve something realistic with a few steps.

#7

Many thanks for the suggestions, Oscar.

I will certainly work on adding some imperfections and the metal socket is a good place to start. I have experimented with the noise texture but not marble, I’ll give it a try.

By chance I watched a YouTube demonstration of the 3D paint texture earlier this week so I’m keen to try that, it looks like a really powerful tool for adding detail. I haven’t experimented with the occlusion nor curvature textures yet. I did watch Will Gibbons’ explanation of how they work but haven’t tried them yet.

I have plenty to keep me busy in the coming weeks and months (years probably ).

Thanks again for all of the suggestions and the positive feedback.

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