Lighting in Photography vs Computer Graphics

I am just trying to share some of the computer graphics pictures I have rendered in past a few years. I think by looking at them, you can see why photography is so closely related and why I am interested so much.


This picture is inspired by one of the Absolut Vodka advertisement. I called my vodka Absolut Barnyar ( Barnyar in Myanmar means Blah Blah). It was made more than 1 year ago in Maya and rendered with mental ray using dielectric materials. I was trying to achieve gradient frosted glass look on the bottle.. which I find is really expensive to render. This image took almost 30min to render on my laptop (Centrino 1.6 GHz)

For lighting, you can see I was using digital equivalent of soft boxes placed like that for reflection and soft shadows. Its rendered using final gathering in Mental ray to get color bleeding and such.
Same bottle from another angle and back drop. This image is still not finished. You can see the glass is almost black. The reason is I have not set full ray traced depth to get it transparent. Its expensive to render transparency in CG. That's why I am so happy to do so in Photography.

I did this about a year ago for CG talk lighting challenge entry. Lighting was done via 2 soft area light ( soft box) placed on left and right of the model. The reflection is from a HDR image.

This was done 3 years ago. Using a area light + HDR lighting too.

Lately, I haven't create anything CG at home. Working as a CG artist is enough for me. That's why I am doing more photography lately. I still like CG and creating photorealisitic images in it. But so far, I dont wanna fire up Maya or anything CG at home.

I think I will get tired in Photography if I have to do it for profession too. :P