DanCBradbury

you should change the name from LEGO to LECO! IT'S ALMOST EXACTLY ALIKE!! I'M A GENIOUS! lol. but, i dont think they'd care. They normally like the added publicity anywhere they can get it.

Well, the story that goes along with the knife goes like this: it's the year 1400, and the knife is hand crafted and well kept, but it's 90 years old. The majority of the knife will be fine, but i need to redo the blade. I will be adding rust to the sharp areas of the knife and dulling the reflectivity a bit. Hopefully i'll get it looking very old but taken care of. That's what i'm striving for

I made this in another topic a while ago, but it still is current. just click here to discover the wonders of normal mapping. Also, nvidia has a normal map plug-in that will make your textures a lot easier to create. nvidia

oh ya! that's what they were called. lol. sorry about that. yes, your model doesnt look like it's using many... or any of those very wonderful hooks.

i like your render. Nice lego man... and photon maping.

lol. i wish. no i just found this on the interweb. it's a pretty awesome styalized picture of him. TRODOR BURNS IN THE NIGHT!!!! lol

your backdrop confuses the senses... you should extend the ground untill the shadows drop off... and then bring it up... but other than that... awesome setup.

here you guys go... i repositioned the lights so you could see the spectral atributes.

Well, here is the model (flat shaded) in model mode. I've found that radiosity realy loves to dull both reflectivity, and spectrality because with rays bouncing off of everysurface in eveyr possible angle, it's like it's in a sky light choreography, and spectrality is hardly noticable. So what i'm probably going to do is only use one light for my renders. that way the spectrality will be very bright and centralized in one area... instead of the whole knife surface.

well, right now it's specular settings are Size: 13%, Intensity: 830%, and the reflectivity setting is 0-100% (based on reflecivity map).

Hi all. I recently started work on a new model. It's a very old and weathered knife with a wooden handle surrounded by a piece of leather. Just wondering if it looks anywhere near photorealistic (which i know it's not) and what i can do to improve it. Oh and, does anyone have any materials for leather? Hope you guys can help me out with this.

that is awesome. you should have the star anchored to the elves some how though. Very nice.

wow... that's a lot of patches. Are you sure you needed all of those? My retro is only about 3k... which is mostly the the grills fault, but you should realy invest in some anchoring cp's... it realy helps when everything needs to get smooth. Very nice though. You're tires are more detailed than your car. lol

I realy dont fallow what exactly you were saying there... but with normal maps, you can overlay them to create changes in the frequency of red, green, and blue. The combination of two normal maps will result in frequency nutrilization, frequency increase, or frequency decrease. Just for the heck of it, i made a ripple normal map and off-set two stamps of the normal map. Here are the results.

I realy like what you've done so far with this dragon-man. But... he's missing something. You should really change him up a bit to look more like this.

Lookin' spiffy. Now, how exactly are you going to get it to function like a real bed? a spring system? or make it a cloth? I'm not real trained the the ways of machanica physics in this program.

Thanks jeff. I still have to send it off to the designer for an ok... and then... i'll probably do some more with the car. It seems he's never happy. lol.

Here's the finished back window. Let me know what you guys think.

oakchas, i talked with the designer, and i'm probably going to be making the windows and hood much more streamlined. What do you guys think of the new plans for the retro?

No, don't change your lighting system you have now, rather lower the sky light object intensity and add a new light object, different from the one you use for the skylight rig, and add it to the choreography with a very high light intensity. Ok... here's what ya have to do for this to work properly. In Colin's zip, there are only three files that you need. One is reflection.mat, another is carpaint.mat, and finaly the environment map uffizi.tga. Anything else in that file you can just go ahead and delte. Now, import these materials into your project file and apply both the reflection and carpaint materials to your car paint group. If you want to have chrome or glass groups utalize the environment map material, you are going to have to duplicate the reflective.mat file and rename it to something like... reflectiv(glass).mat, and then update the needed reflectivity values, environment opacity values, etc. If that still isnt working, i'll just send you the needed materials for all the basic groups. Yes, pretty much all the colors from the preset swatch list when you go to select a color are pure colors (not sure why he called them solid). Basically, make sure you dont have pure reds, blues, greens, yellow, etc. You should always lower the saturations of colors. Nothing in real life is ever 100% bright or 100% dark, rather they are a shade between (unless of course you are the sun in which case you have colors way above 100% brightness). For my red color i used this RGB setting: 200, 33, 33 but you can use any color settings you want. For the most part i usually go about ±25% desaturation for all my colors. Also, 100% desaturated isnt real either... so when making a shade of grey, i usually bring the saturation up a bit so it has an element of blue, or red, w/e.

right now your models are looking awesome, and the renders reflect that. What you have to udnerstand is... that you need something for the car to reflect for it to look shiny. Right now all you have is white everywhere. I suggest using the paint material and environment maps Colin posted, which i used in my retro. Also, if you want very noticalbe spectrality you're gunna have to create a very very bright sun light, and lower the intensities for the sky lights. My retro gave me my renders... and i'm pretty satisfied at how good they came out. If you need any help as to how to apply colins materials just let me know... he realy didnt explain it and it's rather confusing. Here's an old one in red i did when i first got his matterial. (i only rendered it half way... so that's why it looks all pixilated)

have you thought about radiosity or caustics for your models? it would add so much to the overall render believability. still... you have some pretty amazing little buildings there.

na... that's just a decorative chrome trim that runs from the hood of the car to the back bumper. Oakchas, to fix this it would probably take a considerable amount of time... and i'd have to ask the cars designer first. But i will definatly bring this up at our next meeting. Thanks for the tips 'n pix.

i'll pay you two goblins for a gargoyl! lol. Not sure how they'd go about doing that.

I'd have to see a reference photo... not sure if that would work for my car though... everything on it is stream lined... and having the hood curl over like that would break the smooth look i think. here ya go.