3D or Photography?

For a number of years now I have been professionally making images of jewellery using both my photography studio and Cinema 4D, a professional 3D modelling application.

I love photography (please see my photography documentary work here) but when it comes to making images of jewellery for product/brand promotion I prefer 3D over photography for a number of reasons. 

This series of posts will outline those reasons while this particular post is about Cost and Creativity and the plinth in the below images.

The plinth in this series of 5 images is a very simple shape made in Cinema 4D. The shape started life as a cube and with a little bit of lengthening, scaling and rotating it became the shape you see in the images.

The metal material applied to the plinth has a slight ‘roughness’ added to it. Without this roughness the reflection of the ring in the plinth would be a mirror image - which in my opinion would make the whole image a little disturbing and confusing to look at. The ring is the star of the shot and needs to stand out.

The ‘roughness’ on the metal also serves to tone down the reflections of the lights hitting the plinth. Cinema 4D’s ‘roughness’ slider has a scale from 0 to 1 - with 0 being a mirror finish while setting the slider to 1 results in a dull reflection free material.

In these images the roughness is set at 0.2 which gives just the right amount of reflection for this series of images.

The grooves and slots in the sides of the plinths were a very simple addition (3D modelling 101) that took hardly any time using a specific 3D tool. 

And after a few trail runs with the adobe colour wheel, the two complementing colours in the plinths were also easy and quick to add.

To make one of these plinths in the real world would be very expensive and risky. Putting aside the hundreds of pounds it would cost to make a metal plinth with grooves and two different colour metals that look a good as the ones in the images, what if one was ordered and made only to find on the day shoot that the ring and plinth did not work together visually - which happens.

Scene building and props are a very tricky aspect of the overall image to get right.

As illustrated above, in the 3D environment the prop/plinth can be adjusted in many ways so that shape, size, colour, material and details etc, can be adjusted an infinite number of times till things are just right.

This is one reason I prefer 3D over photography when it comes to making images of jewellery.