This project had the main goal to obtain belivable diamonds in first place and realistic watch in second. Hereafter you can see an image from the manufacturer site, which by the way is a mix of rendered watch and photo-inserted belt.
The image from the manufacturer site:
While modelling I was thinking about how I would render a watch like this, and I have decided that this could be a chance to make a challenge between 4 render engines we have here in our studio: Vray, Corona, Maxwell and Octane.
Nota Bene: All the scenes were illuminated by a hdri + some plane lights depending on a certain situation.
Nota Bene: All the final images were obtained by mixing the render of watch alltogether and the diamonds only separate render.
Vray 2.4
With all the advantages it offers and settings it has to be able to play with, it didn't get the result the client was expecting to see in regard of the look of the diamonds. LC+Brute Force.
Corona alpha 5
Blazing fast, but has no dispersion yet. Didn't help even the trick with the blend of 3 shades(R,G,B) of glass with slightly different IOR which worked in vray till the in software dispersion was released. So here we get plain glass in place of diamonds, on the other hand this way it's cheaper so we can afford one watch like this
. PT+PT
Maxwell 3.0
Good guy Maxwell, not bad, but not exactly what we were searching for. On our workstation config it showed slower render times than Corona and Vray. Though it is not a tool to ignore, in some situations it can be a game changer.
Octane 1.22 3ds max plugin
The champ in Client's Choice category and also in the slowest among this 4 render engines category, on our configuration (1x GTX680). It was nice to have less settings to adjust for the render itself, though material system was a bit of a pain to set up, the blend of blends maybe should be changed for a layered blend as in vray or maxwell. PMC, 16 bounces, 10K saples, 6h(3+3), 900x900 pixels
The images from Vray and Octane engines were also thrown through Frischluft Lens Care, even if they had their own native DOF this was augmented intentionally for the artistic purpose.
Some more images:
P.S. Didn't get to know how much expensive a watch like this could be, but it has 230 diamonds, 10 rubies and 1600 semiprecious stones in micro mosaic inside the watch itself, and the body made of white gold.
Our reproduction of the watch doesn't have 230 diamonds, they were much to small for our reproduction so we decided to make them bigger and fewer.
software: 3ds max, Zbrush, render engines, photoshop.