An illustration for NGK Iridium Spark Plugs used for point of purchase and other sales visuals.
A Few Lighting Tips
A magician never reveals their secrets, right? Well, I'm going to briefly describe the way I lit these models. Some illustrators would use brute force lighting, HDRI's and even baked textures, but there is a much less processor intensive way of doing it, and that way is using as many lighting passes as you need to create an effect. In the example above, I used seven lighting passes, one diffuse pass, an alpha pass, and a z-depth pass.
This was never going to be a motion piece, so I excluded a velocity pass. I could have used any post editor to do the compositing, but in this case I used Photoshop. And, if it had been a motion shot, I would have used Fusion or Combustion.
Modeling
If your using a NURB's model because it was exported from Solidworks or Catia, you shouldn't have any issues with the rendering. If your model is a subdivision poly, make sure you model in a way that when you subdivide you model your chamfers hold their angles (within reason).
UVWs & Mapping
Get that base mesh UVed distortion free from the get-go or else youre going to be in trouble.
Render it.
The renderer doesn't matter too terribly much, just as long as you can edit the passes in a free form kind of way. For example, I took one of the lighting passes and created a blurring pass with it. An image starts to take on a more organic feel quickly when you start adding lens phenomena such as coma, blur, chromatic aberration and depth of field. If you really want to get good final images, you need to reproduce what renderers fail at doing, which is recreating (or simulating) real world physics. Observe the way light effects real world surfaces, and reproduce lighting flares or aberrations that occur because the surface of your eye is imperfect. Real world physics are dirty and the dirtier the image, the more closer to reality it will be.