Hey there,
this post Is a little sneak peek in my current job as a 3D Graphic Artist/designer at Alza.cz a.s. where I do product visualization for private brands. First I want to thank Otakar Libra for teaching me a lot about lighting and recommending some amazing literature.
SOFTWARE
We use Blender for everything (modeling, texturing, rendering) and Photoshop for render combination, final touches, and web export.
PROJECTS
One of the main brands Alza🗲Power is focused on electronics, varying from batteries, cables to solar panels, etc.
Lighting wite products is a challenging task, it's very common to make several renders and then put them together in Photoshop.
On this project, I got to do protective covers for one of the smaller off-brands. It was an opportunity to learn some cloth sim in Blender. Bike and Lawnmowers are bought models, UV'd ant textured by me.
It helped me a lot to look into traditional product photography as they have similar principles.
BOOKS
There are two books I'm currently reading.
The first one is Light Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting by Fil Hunter recommended to me by Otakar Libra.
It's a very technical book, describing precise methods of lighting, with exact light setup and explanation. The second one would be
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney. It's more about light and color theory rather than the exact light setup.
VIDEO SOURCES
These are some youtube channels that have been very useful to me.
Square Mountain
Karl Taylor
Daniel Schiffer
botvidsson
EXR FORMAT
We also use an Exr-IO plugin for Blender cycles and Photoshop, which allows you to save your render in separated passes, allowing you to reconstruct and tweak many aspects in Photoshop without the necessity to render it again. This amazing video explains it way better than me HERE.
You can get the plugin for free HERE, it works with other renderers too.
I hope you found something interesting and that these sources might help someone as they did to me.
Thank you for reading. :)