Piano - Low Poly

Description:

When I was a bit bored during holidays this summer, I started to work on a quite realistic (I hope so) animation of a playing piano. This is one of my first uploads, so it would be nice to give me some feedback about my work.

The piano itself consists of 8 simple forms that have a subsurf modifier for mor detail and smoothness with 4 subdivisions. The black parts of the piano have a black, very hard piano lacquer as a material, the keyboard a white lacquer. The realism is given by the reflectivity of the lacquer material. This may cause a quite long render time. (Btw, the render engine is the Blender Internal Render.) The pedals have a not so intense golden material, different to the golden sign, which has the form of a music note. That can of course be replaced by a logo of a popular piano builder or something else. There are no textures at all, only the materials.

To animate the piano playing, rotate the several keys by 3°-5° at X-Axis. The keys are linked to two empties "Keyboard (white keys)" and "Keyboard (black keys)".

To get a good and realistic render result, you have - depending of the camera position - to play around with the lamps to get nice reflections in the lacquer. There are two lamps, a point and an area lamp, both are not to bright, to light only up the piano but to have a kind of a mysterious darkness around it.

As you can see in the Node Setup, there is some compositing done after rendering: A glare is added, the image is color corrected with an RGB-"S"-Curve to light up the bright parts of the image and a defocus filter gets the Z-value from the image through a Map Value node and adds some bokeh. Play around with all these values to get an interesting and realistic result. I recommend to animate the camera's depth of field value (it is linked to an Empty called "DoF" that you can easily move around) to get a nice focus effect.