Still Life With Honey (V-Ray)

A few weeks ago, I was getting lost in the still-life, food-styling and Scandi corners of Pinterest and decided I would try to emulate the look of one of these dark, moody still lives (check out Kate S Jordan to get the rough idea).

I started with something quite minimalistic and, as too often, got a little carried away in the details.

This ended up being a great modeling exercise and a good excuse to dig a little deeper into ZBrush and Quixel, which I hadn’t really used all that much since buying a license a long time ago and did a really good job adding interest to some of the textures and materials (for instance the scissors and the pepper mill).

I also decided to do three versions of the scene for V-Ray, Corona and Octane. You can get all three here if you’re so inclined.

The version at the top, and the one all others are derived from, is V-Ray. The Corona version is below…

Still Life With Honey (Corona)

And this is Octane. I’ll let you ponder the respective qualities and deficiencies.

Still Life With Honey (Octane)

I’m also adding some quick and dirty detailed shots in V-Ray…

Still Life Detail (V-Ray)

Corona…

Still Life Detail (Corona)

And Octane.

Still Life Detail (Octane)

This was a pretty heavy scene to render, with lots of complicated shaders, displacement and a few simple particle systems. Interestingly, none of the three renderers seemed to be faster than the other, though V-Ray and Corona’s denoisers helped in cleaning up some of the residual noise.

For the polynerds, here are a few wire shots below and a short video of a viewport walk-through of the scene.

If you have questions, please ask them on the blog as I can’t comment on the Facebook page.

Still Life (wires)

Still Life (wires)

Still Life (wires)

Still Life (wires)

Still Life (wires)