Making a top-level render needs lots of work, like making background, props, rigging and posing any characters you want to show, possibly few dozen various light sources and render time of several hours. I can't do those yet.
That said, you could improve that render a lot with just a few tricks.
1) One light to cast shadows, at least one light to provide secondary light.
Example: one Area or Spot light that light your object. Look at the "shadow and spot" options area in the light parameters, make sure Ray Shadow and "Adaptive QMC" are on, and set "samples" to something that works on your computer (5? 10?). This will give you main light and decent shadows.
2) Put in a plane to RECEIVE the shadows cast by light 1.
Add a new plane. Give it a new material. In the new material's settings, check "Only Shadow". Position the plane so that object(s) casting shadows are between the plane and light 1. You can lower the alpha value of the plane to get lighter shadows, and warp the plane in some way to get more interesting shadows.
- temp.JPG (12.64 KiB) Viewed 6451 times
3) Change the blue background color into a neutral color; a gray or gray-ish color isn't always optimal, but for most images it's much better than the blue.
You can change the background color on the same page where you can enable background stars, (World buttons, shortcut F8). You can also change the other two colors and vary background from single color to gradient.
4) Get rid of black-as-blackest-night shadows on the unlighted side of the object(s). You can change Ambient color on World buttons, or add a second light (falloff: constant, huge range, casts no shadows and/or doesn't affect specularity). A backlight (another bright-moderately bright light behind the object) can also help a lot.
- A silly example
I haven't textured any of my recent models yet, but I I'll post them any way.
your hints and tips mean allot to me xD you're the first one to help me out ever since i got lotus to help me xD thats a long long long long looooong time ago xD this will come in handy when im going to show off the rest of the sword when its done xD
