Light and Rendering

Product visualization and rendering with Blender 3D and LuxRender

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Allan Brito May 30, 2009

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If you want to learn about advanced rendering techniques in Blender 3D to use in architectural visualization projects, a great source of information to learn that is to look for product visualization tutorials. The techniques and setup of scenes are quite similar on both fields, only the scale of the models change. A great example of tutorial related to product visualization that can be used to improve your renderings in LuxRender was released a few days ago by an artist called Phil Beauchamp.

The tutorial shows the workflow and setup of Blender 3d to import a model from a software called MOI3D and render it with LuxRender. This is the tutorial:

Rendering MOI3D Models in Blender and Luxrender from Phil Beauchamp on Vimeo.

The model used to work with the tutorial is a lamp, modeled in MOI3D. This is a curve based modeler, which was in development until a while ago. Notice that the tutorial was created in a beta version of MOI3D.

There are two things that you will learn in this tutorial that could be a great help in future projects:

• How to setup a studio environment in Blender 3D
• How to work with Light Groups in LuxRender

I know that the first topic is more related with product visualization, but it can be very useful for architects as well. For instance, if you have to create customized furniture model for a project and want to present the result to a client. The trick is to work with the background settings of Blender. Watch the video and you will see.

The light group of LuxRender is quite more useful for us, and allows an artist to change the intensity of a light after the render has started. In the tutorial, the artist uses materials that emit light from the meshes, and after the render has stared he makes a few adjustments to the intensity all lights. This feature is very similar to the Multilight tool available in Maxwell Render.

Just imagine that we can create an interior scene and set all lights, which after a few hours of rendering we find out that the lights are too weak. With the light groups we can simply increase the intensity of some lights.