LED lighting-like environment?

[Kinetic99]

Hello and thank you for your time,

I'm trying to make a better lighting environment for some shiny metallic or silvery objects that I need to render. In reality, I find the crisp white focused light of LED's to really pop out reflections and create strong contrasts in the reflections and the form of the object: with sharp highlight pings, etc.

Right now I use HDRI maps at 32 bit of a 360 panoramic lighting photography scene that is ok but it could be better. If I use VRAY lighting, I find my render times go through the roof, so I am trying to avoid that for now.

So I was wondering if there was a really good lighting and/or environment set-up that would best mimick a panorama of LED lights with HDRI maps. Should I go the HDRI map or VRAY lighting route for this??

Any ideas are most welcome.

K

[Joelaff]

HDR Light Studio would let you build custom HDRis for lighting with ease. You can build them yourself in something like Fusion or Nuke, or even Photoshop, though PS is not the best thing for HDR.

To reduce render times with VRay lights make sure the sampling is 16-32 (yes, higher can be faster). If you only need them for highlights then disable shadows and/or diffuse shading.

It can be helpful to put a VRaySoftBox map on your lights to slightly vignette the edges and avoid really hard edges.

I tend to light thing like the photographer I am... Start with one or two lights, and then place black, silver, or white cards in key places. Though I would normally use another dim soft light in place of silver cards for bounce.

Also, experiment with the directional setting for your lights. It's a lot like a grid spot in real life. I think there is a bug in 3.1.03 (and possibly below) where directionality can increase noise that should be fixed in the nightlies soon if not already.