Porcelaine material

Hey guys,
I want to make it look like porcelaine or any white glazed ceramic. But I just dont get these sharp reflections…


I dont know why… The picture should stay that dark…
Is it because I dont have an environment?

Ceramic.3dm (15.7 MB)

Thnks for the help!

-Paul

Hi Paul Wellmer,

There are a couple of key differences between the ref image and your setup.
In the reference the environment is much brighter and contributes more to the reflections of the material.
The ref object is also curved and more imperfect which makes for the more interesting reflections.
The bottom line is that it’s all about what’s being reflected and the shape and curvature of the porcelain object.
Your setup is quite a bit more challenging compared to the ref.
Even if you had the real object and waned to shoot a studio-style photo it wouldn’t be easy…

There are a couple of things I tried to make the result look more like what you’re after:

  1. A Reflection environment is added in the V-Ray settings. I’ve used a random HDR from https://polyhaven.com/
  2. The ground geometry is faded with a gradient/ramp to hide unwanted reflections
  3. The ground is now using an override material. The one visible to the camera is the opacity mapped blurry reflective one (the original) and the one visible in other objects’ reflections is opaque and polished. This makes for more interesting reflections on the side of the box. It otherwise mostly reflects the dark blurry surface leading to quite dark and ambient reflections.
  4. A couple of area lights have been placed close to the object to produce some more intense highlights. They are both invisible and do not affect the diffuse light in the scene. A grid texture is connected to the light surface to add details (simulating a window or something).
  5. The bump of the Porcelain material is increased to increase the surface imperfections. If you want to remove the small bumps in the texture you can do so in an image post-processing app.

Here’s the result:

It can obviously be tweaked further but I hope this example gives you some ideas.
Here’s an archive of the test scene:
Ceramic_test_02.zip (19.0 MB)

Regards,
Konstantin

1 Like

Hey Konstantin,
Thanks for the help! It helped me out and I understood the process a little better. It indeed seems like a difficult object to render.

Thanks again!
-Paul