To improve my lighting skills, I set myself the task of taking a real-life photography lighting setup and rebuilding it in 3D. The whole thing had to be done in two hours.
The Reference
I used the summer drink photography guide from C47 Academy as my starting point. I recreated the full setup exactly: This included the position of the lights, the color temperature, and the camera position and settings. The idea was to figure out what lighting works best by learning from photographs.
If you enjoy food and drink photography, I highly recommend checking out C47's work on Instagram. His images are a great source of inspiration, and the guides are really easy to follow.
The Scene
The subject is a summer drink with fruit in it, which is a great choice for lighting practice. The glass, liquid, reflections and highlights quickly show whether your lighting works or not.
The Process
I built everything in Blender. All the models were created by me, with no downloaded assets from online libraries. This gave me control over the entire workflow, from the initial shape to the final render.
I challenged myself to finish in two hours, covering modelling, texturing, lighting and rendering. In the end, I needed about 30 extra minutes, bringing the total time to roughly 2 hours and 30 minutes. This was mainly due to fine adjustments to the glass and color grading in post.
The Hardest Part: The Glass
The glass was by far the most difficult element. Achieving believable refraction, clean edges and highlights that looked like glass rather than plastic required the most iterations, and this is where most of my extra time was spent.
What I Took Away
Working from a real photographer's setup was a valuable experience. Rather than guessing where the lights should go, I could see how a professional shapes a subject with light and learn directly from that. Translating this into a 3D environment showed me how real-world lighting principles can be applied to CGI. Most importantly, I learned that less light can beautifully illuminate a whole scene. Once again, less is more.
Here the final result:
