Simulate a beauty dish?

Hi there,

I’ve been researching a few different lighting techniques in the real world and one of the more intriguing ones is beauty lighting with a beauty dish. I happened upon this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYGCOyiVERE

Is there any advantage to recreating a 3D beauty dish? Would there be any observable differences in lighting with a 3D beauty dish as opposed to using a plane to light the scene with an emission texture?

Finally, I saw someone who had an .hdr/.exr texture of a beauty dish. It was a maya tutorial. Does anyone use something similar to this as their emission source?

Thanks!

In the real world, there are difference between light modelers. a softbox spray light in many direction, on the other hand, with a beauty dish, the light rays are more or less parrallel. That’s what give a crispy picture with a lof of micro-contrast.

Interesting video.

I’ve used EXR images of studio lights before - you can get some free ones here (scroll to the bottom) http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html

How about trying it? Make changes in the scene, test render, compare.



One thing that’s commonly done in real-world close up photography is to use a ring light, which surrounds the lens of the camera sometimes at some slight distance. Another common technique is tiny point-lights coming from fiber optics, which are positioned strategically just outside of camera range. The lights are often set to very, very low power, and the set, also, is tiny. There might be mere inches from the edge of the photo and the edge of the set. The light is highly directional with very little fill.

Thanks very much for the rendered tests! I didn’t try it because I’m busy with other things and I just happened upon spending 15-20 minutes a day for a few day looking up lighting techniques. I haven’t had the time to build a full on beauty dish in 3D and I didn’t know where to find any HDR images of lighting setups as someone posted above. Also, the tests you give above don’t show a beauty dish setup which was what I’m asking about. I’ve done the other setups that you show in your second image so props for understanding what I’m talking about! At least I know I’m on the right track so thanks for your hard work!

That’s fascinating! I will be sure to look that up. Not sure how to simulate that in 3D but I’m sure there’s a way :slight_smile:

Thank you! This will come in handy :slight_smile:

So are you saying that a plane is more like a softbox or a beauty dish?