Tips on Lighting (Product Visualization)

[vicmds]

I can't for the life of me get this right in Corona. With HDRI in a brighter scene, I believe I can get passable results, though admittedly not realistic (see attached image).

But whenever I try and set a pitch dark environment, I can't balance the lighting. Materials start looking incredibly dull. Altering the EV leads me nowhere.

Here's a general example everyone knows by now. I'm not necessarily going for this look, but of course we all aim to accomplish animation as good as this. It's very simple, but what did they do here regarding environment?

Do you customarily use Reflections override for this? What light size and directionality to use?

[Philip kelly]

The ads in the middle of a post are just plane silly.

Is that the ways things are going now.

[vicmds]

The ads in the middle of a post are just plane silly.

Is that the ways things are going now.

It's a reference to help illustrate my questions, sorry if it's not "plane" obvious. I'm not sure what your point is.

If it's somehow against forum rules, please let me know.

[Noah45]

Nice rends, MS ads are better. I kid!

[Nejc Kilar]

After quickly glancing at the youtube link...

My thinking is that they've used a bunch of "softbox" lights (which are visible area lights with a slight falloff / gradient at the edges) to bring out that metal chrome look.

I would guess that most other metals are glossy up to a point where you perceive them differently as chrome (they look more diffuse / or they probably have a diffuse component to them). Looking at chrome you can see that the lighting set up was probably pitch black with the exception of a few lights.

That said, they could have faked the whole thing and have added environment maps for the reflections or something of that nature - maybe even in post.

That would be my initial impression at least.

edit: Maybe I am stupid but your try looks quite cool to me. If you disable direct visibility (i.e set it to black) then I guess you'll probably need to take some of the saturation out of the HDRI. You could also put a slight gradient for your background... To me it does not appear thats how they did it but still...

[vicmds]

Thanks! I sure still have some trial and error to do. But I'm liking the HDRI approach.

I'm in a bit of trouble with a deadline for something else, but later I'll try and report what I came up with for this one.