Illumination Tutorial for Industrial/ Product/ Furniture Design by Mario Malagrino, Italy

Create a white self-illuminated material and apply it to the boxes. If you make a rendering you will see a big difference.



The reflections of these boxes are giving the impression of two light sources like windows or big white panels which are used also in the field of professional photography. You can notice that previous image is a little bit darker than later image even I did not change the light settings. Why this?

Whenever you enable final gather you will notice that self illuminated objects are able to create light. The bigger your self-illuminated object, the brighter the surface close to it will be. That's why the rendering in later image is a bit brighter.

Be careful with the size of the 2 boxes, don't make them too big and don't place them too close to the teapot, otherwise you will create too bright areas. At this point you can do a final rendering. This means you must set all settings to the maximum values, in this way you will have a perfect rendering. In the render panel set Minimum samples per pixel "4", maximum “16”. If you change the BOX filter to "Mitchell" your rendering will be a bit sharper. The minimum size of a final rendering should be 1024*768 pixels (bigger is of course better). Don't forget to increase the shadow samples (area light sampling) to 32 or better 64, in this way your shadows will be perfect. Put in final gather sample slot 300, if this is not enough put 400. Now make your final rendering.

The result of last rendered image is already very good, but we can improve it. I also teach to my students that Photoshop is a tool which is able to improve a rendering in many different ways. Let's apply a glow effect to our highlights ( in our case we will assign a glow effect to the reflected boxes on the teapot to give the impression that there is a lot of energy coming from the white panels). Select the "magic wand tool" to create a mask on the brightest parts (which are in this case the white boxes) of the teapot surface. Now press on your keyboard CTRL+C and than CTRL+V (copy and paste). You will see in the layer panel (F7) that automatically you have created a new layer on which there is only the masked part of the teapot.



Now make a left double mouse click on the blue bar of the new layer. You will enable a window (layer style panel) with really great tools (try them, they are really interesting). Choose "OUTER glow" and change the yellow glow color to white. Now select the size slider and move it to the right side. Now you have a very nice glow effect on the teapot.

Another very interesting effect that you can create on a image is a Depth of field effect (DOF). In this way you can simulate a sharp focus point on the teapot. The part of the object which is far away will be a bit blurred (like in photography). First of all we must fuse the background image (original rendering) with the glow effect layer. Just go to Layer > Flatten image.



Now make a right mouse click on the layer and choose "duplicate layer". In this way you will have two layers, one is the perfect copy of the other. Apply on the copy a gaussian blur effect.


The last step is very important. Choose the "eraser tool" and delete the part of the image which should be sharp. Try to use a soft brush and set it to opacity 60.



That's it:) I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial.

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