Just a quick low res render.
I am not sure about the colors the placement of things, or the materials. I tried appending apples i made for the gold bowl but it did not want to launch luxrender, so im still working on that.
I want to put volumetric dust in it for atmosphere, but i think that will increase render time exponentially.
So i’ve updated it, i’ve probably made all the beginner mistakes from the pinned thread. Because im not an artist and i dont know about color harmonies, golden ratio and proportions or anything arty like that, im just a rendering fanatic.
So any suggestions welcome and any questions on how i made the stuff is welcome.
Just something I notice in the last image is the glass bottle on the left side seems to be floating. Maybe because I can’t see the shadow on the table or the edge of the bowl and the edge of tge bottle are lined up from this angle. Besides that great concept.
Thanks yes you’re correct. Its because the hdr light causes no shadow only ambient occlusion, but i do have a spotlight that casts a shadow, and i can turn it up or down during the render or after, which is why i like Luxrender.
Just wanted to give some more info on the scene. I am still a blender noob, but i did not follow any tutorial for this scene. Everything i made from scratch, except for i took the wall texture, the apple texture and the blanket texture from google images. The wood side is a procedural martial from luxredners database, the grapes is my first attempt at any kind of fruit so im quite pleased with it, and used a glossy translucent material rather than a texture. The liquids are volumetric and took ages to figure out how they work within luxrender.
The dust is done in GIMP which im really surprised that it out shined what photoshop could offer. The plate and spoon were decorated with sculpt mode to get the etching effects which is really easy and saves complex displacement mapping stuff. And one of my favorite functions now of blender is proportional editing, its just great for modeling.
For the rendering settings i turn the main filtering system to Gaussian rather than blackman-harris, so i get no jaggies. Render path is Hybrid, so that the CPU uses all features including proper caustics, volumetrics and any feature not supported by OpenCL, but at the same time the GPU chips in with some heavy lifting work on the calculation of rays (apparently), utilizes about 10-20% GPU but still a nice speedup. Luxrender OpenCL does support HDR and even EXR lighting so maybe it can be introduced to cycles.
changed a few things around. Its still probably breaking a lot of art rules like ratios and what not tho.
Good start, sono!
For the rendering settings i turn the main filtering system to Gaussian rather than blackman-harris, so i get no jaggies. Render path is Hybrid, so that the CPU uses all features including proper caustics, volumetrics and any feature not supported by OpenCL, but at the same time the GPU chips in with some heavy lifting work on the calculation of rays (apparently), utilizes about 10-20% GPU but still a nice speedup.
I heard, that Luxrender can use both, CPU and GPU, at the same time. I sometimes wish, we could have that for Cycles. But while Cycles can use both, its either CPU or GPU at the same time, what you are surely aware of.
I like the brighter scene and the sun light in your latest render. Some suggestions for now would be to add some kind of support to the board. There is something like a visible seam on the big amphora. Maybe the texture is repeating? Hard to say anything regarding the materials at this stage. The render is a bit too grainy. But you should keep working on the ceramic shaders. And the shadows could be stronger.
I like the realism of the new wall in the background 
One thing that would be a nice touch, protect me from the ones that are not " manufactured", would be to go through in and make the edges of the bottles and the bowls uneven. This is something I was noticing when I was looking at some very old bottles when I was doing some modeling recently.
Great suggestions thanks.
Also, the green one… Is that supposed to be a wine bottle? If it’s a modern day wine bottle, it’s missing the extrusion towards the top that all wine bottles have. On some wine bottles, this goes all the way to the top, but in most, it’s only about an inch. And if it’s for red wine, the bottle would be a darker shade of green (to help keep light from harming the wine). (I know wine bottles because I work with them every day.)
I would prefer darker shadows, dimmer lights, and more contrast between the board and the wall, but that’s just preference. My serious critique goes to the grapes. They should be flopped out on the plate, not hovering above it, and the material makes them look like dull metal. You should add some sharper, brighter gloss, and give them a wet feel and some red glow in them where the light hits them. The apples need more gloss too, and I agree with gradyp, the wine bottles should be darker with more shading. Still, really nice render.
BTW, I know nothing about luxrender, Including the materials.
The hybrid mode is deprecated. Try using LuxCore Path OpenCL instead, it should be much faster.
Also consider trying the new LuxCore mode: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxBlend25_LuxCore
It should export and render faster, and you can use viewport rendering and other stuff that’s described in the wiki.
If you have any questions, ask me here or in the Lux forum (I don’t check here too often).
Path OpenCL is not working for me on this scene, i have a material somewhere that is does not support, which is typical, i cant even find it tho, it might be the silver metal.
Hybrid Path does support more features, although i have just rendered with it and realized it does not show proper caustics like the bidirectional path.
Also Luxrender has a memory leak, which means if i leave overnight renders it will crash after a few hours when it eats all 8GB of RAM.
Trying to make some improvements, got this ivy to work with luxrender, with some messing around, might desaturate the leaf color. Also the wall is not receiving transparent shadows, which i can hopefully fix.
These were with the Hybrid path, 320 samples about 30 mins render time.
Im try to work out why it looks so crappy. So critique is welcome.
As I said, Hybrid Path is deprecated, outdated, discouraged to use because of reasons like this.
What do you mean by “transparent shadows”?
You have some heavy terminator artifacts on that pot on the left (the transition from lit area to shadow), maybe you are using too much bump height? Try disabling the bumpmap to test if that’s the cause.
What kind of light source are you using? Sun?
This was rendered in pure open CL.
I still need ideas or advice to make it look more professional. It just looks like a bit of a mess like all my renders.
The clear white decanter… Is that supposed to be wine it it? Something about that particular one (or its contents) just isn’t looking right to me.
I like this version here much better than the one with the harsher shadows. And the texturing all the way around is coming along nicely.
I like it. Maybe try some subsurface scattering or transparency in the grapes!
Best!
