Watch renders - Audemars Piguet, Jean Dunand, Rolex...

[Ahmed Sharif]

Hi, these are all personal projects. A few of them will end up in my portfolio when I start looking for work, I'm not sure yet which ones will make it.

I haven't posted my work online before, so this is the first time I'm showing them to professionals. I welcome any critiques.

[Ahmed Sharif]

[Ahmed Sharif]

[vlado]

That's a lot of watches Did you model everything?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ahmed Sharif]

I love watches as a render subject, I have even more waiting to be rendered in my hard disk.
Yes I've modeled them all using simple polygonal modeling. The Rolex was the first one I modeled a long time ago by following a tutorial on Youtube, I was hooked after that.

[Syclone1]

Really nice work and great attention to detail.

[Macker]

Looks superb. I've never really done product shots, I'm just wondering what your lighting setup looks like? Positions of key/fill lights, etc?

I'm not trying to steal your "secret sauce", I'm just curious.

[Ahmed Sharif]

Thank you Syclone & Macker.

There's no secret sauce to speak of Macker haha. The lighting is 99% HDR Light Studio connected to a Vray dome light, on rare occasions I'll add a Plane Light to highlight the watch glass from grazing angles, but mostly I add that in Photoshop. I've attached a few examples of my environments, I try to light the entire scene using the background gradient, and then use picture lights to target specific surfaces. A couple of the photo lights are from http://alsens.net/103292/products.
If I need a background like in the Rolex renders, I use a backplate plane with a Vray Light material, I push it as far back as needed until I achieve the bokeh effects. I've attached a set up that's almost the same as the other watches.

Cheers.

[Macker]

Thanks for the info & links, very informative!

[AJ Jefferies]

Lovely work! If I was being uber, super, mega picky I'd remove the polygonal pinching on the end of the button/cylinders here http://forums.chaosgroup.com/attachm...8&d=1437138520

[Ahmed Sharif]

Thanks AJ. I meant to fix that right before hitting render but somehow it slipped my mind, I'll make sure it's gone for my online portfolio.

Macker, you're welcome.

By the way, I don't mind if anyone tears these apart, I have a thick skin. I imagined these images to be in a magazine ad, or part of a major press reveal or something like that. Are they suitable for that? Do they look too CG?

Best regards.

[crazy homeless guy]

The images are nice... a few items to look at:

1) The speculars highlights of the watch metal are a bit dull. I would make these the brightest part of the rendering.
2) These could benefit from a glare pass. It would add a extra layer of realism. You can generate this using Vray but I find Glare.exe to be easier to control and produce the results you want faster. http://www.evvisual.com/glare/
3) The brushed stainless material that some of the watches are set against look like it is a rendered material reather than a real material.
4) The gold color in your Tourbillon Orbital series looks fake. All materials in that series could benefit from microscratches to make the materials feel a bit more real.

Reference photography for brighter speculars and a bit of glare:
https://goo.gl/NYGcpY
http://goo.gl/wGsXOC

[Ahmed Sharif]

Thank you homeless guy.

I've brightened the metal parts without affecting the background and you're right, it has improved the image, I've also added a very light bloom layer in Photoshop and I like the result.

I didn't understand point 3, but I agree with you about the gold in the Orbital watches, I've been thinking of starting them all over from scratch because they're the first watches I rendered out of these images, and I've learned a lot since then so maybe I should.

Cheers.