3D Pills: A Rendering Adventure

Recently I have been modeling/ rendering medical, health, and fitness related content at work. This week I decided to work on some medication since it has so many uses for different health related content. It has been quite the adventure! First I started off by modeling the capsules, bottle, and cap in 3ds Max. This was not too difficult. Modifiers came in very handy. Next I wanted to make the materials and lighting very photo realistic. For this project I chose to use Vray as my render engine. 

In the first render I was happy with the material and lighting on the pills but the cast shadows were way too strong and the lighting in the rest of the scene was very dark.  Also the pill vile was lacking an authentic plastic appearance.

 Here I was able to get more evenly distributed lighting but there was some quality loss in the realism of the pills due to a change in the highlights. My co-worker and I still felt that the shadows were a little strong as well. I also did some minor tweaking to the texture of the bottle and cap.

 In This Render, I was very happy with the lighting and everything was nice and even. I was relatively pleased with the quality but I knew that it was not achieving the degree of realism that I was attempting.

 Despite the huge spike in render time, I decided to turn on Global Illumination and Caustics. This was a very good decision. Now the shadows were completely realistic. Also there was very lovely color bouncing happening, especially on the cast shadow of the pill bottle itself. It actually began looking like real translucent plastic.

 Next I decided to zoom the camera out to capture the whole composition now that the materials and lighting were dialed in to my liking. I loved the look of it but I decided that it needed a label to push it to the next level.

So here I fabricated a pharmaceutical label in Photoshop which came out very nice and created a sliced tube that wraps around the pill vile to apply the label to. This gave it a feeling that it is actually a sticker rather then just applying the material directly to the vile.

I am very happy with the results of this project. I still want to give the label another treatment to make it more paper like and maybe light the background a little bit more but other than that I feel this is a very professional quality render. If I really feel like getting wild I might add some focal distance to the camera. Sometimes achieving this quality can take a lot of time and energy; however, I suggest that you go for it in everything that you do because seeing the majesty of the end result is a great feeling.  Also, the more you practice Photo Realism the quicker you will get at achieving results like this!