The One Ring

Hi everyone!

A co-worker of mine suggested me to make The One Ring (from Lord of the Rings) in 3D and since this week has been very, very slow at work, I thought I could give it a try and play around with some of the things I usually don’t get much into when building a Blender scene, like HDRi (my first attempt ever), vertex coloring, transparent textures, normal mapping, UV texturing (the ring was pretty much a nigthmare to map), mirrors and composite nodes, which I never used besides some testing.

It’s rendered with B.I., using AO (5 samples, Raytraced, Constant QMC, Sky texture), and very simple nodes for Glare and Defocus. There are only 2 light sources, 1 sun and 1 hemi.

EDIT: Following your suggestions, I made a new render with a new approach to materials, lighting, and added stuff. More info on my latest post down there! (Just in case, the image on the right is the new one). :slight_smile:

I hope you like it. I consider it finished (I know modelling is not very good, specially on the sword), but I’d appreciate any critics or improvements you may think of, so I can use those for incoming projects!

Thank you! :slight_smile:

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Looks pretty good, although I always imagined the ring as having less blemishes than that. Also the cup looks a bit face, maybe you could add a wood texture to it or something. Still this is a very nicely put together image, and the chain you made is very good.

Wow! I was just thinking the other day that it would be fun to make the one ring, but someone beat me to it! Haha.

As for critiqe, its a pretty well put together scene, but the sword looks like its been painted and that paint is bubling and begining to peel. I agree with Jay Dez, the chain does look really cool. But a lot of the functions you mentioned I have never used and so I give it credits for that.

But its a pretty nice picture, congrats!

If I recall, the one ring had no blemishes whatsoever.

and you could only see the writing when it was hot, and then it would be glowing. nice job though

how did you find the text written on the ring as a flat image?

Nice. I like the matte finish on the ring. It’s a different take on it. Even though the ring isn’t hot and you can see the writing, I like that its somewhat subtle.

  • Floyd

Nice image although I find the green colour in the background distracting.

Even though the ring isn’t hot and you can see the writing

but it goes against the whole lord of the rings idea! i think it ruins the image completely for me… but that might be because im a perfectionist and i love lotr :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for your comments guys. I really appreciate them.

Following your suggestions, I made some changes to improve the scene and made a new render. Basically I increased the mirror value for the ring, worked on the textures (specially chain, wooden cup and table), and changed lighting for a more dramatic effect. Also added a map and a fly (the fly model is not mine, I found it at http://gfx-3d-model.blogspot.com/2008/07/fly.html).

Also increased samples for both AO and sun raytracing to 8 (instead of 5), and tried a new approach at AO with both add and sub using plain energy instead of sky texture.

I know the inscription isn’t supposed to be seen as long as the ring is not hot, but I just wanted to try a more realistic approach and make the inscription visible at plain sight; I’m not an expert on LOTR lore and just used my imagination to create the ring. Also, I’m not sure how would I make the usual representation of the ring, with the bright, glowing inscription, without using some image editing software (and I didn’t want to use anything besides Blender for this). Anyway, I tweaked a bit the inscription to make it more subtle so maybe now it’s closer to what it was supposed to be?

@gregzaal: I just looked for “the one ring inscription” on Google Images and found a lot of them. I just took one of those and adapted it to create my own texture.

@Inferno: sorry I made it first, but seriously, if you want to, just do it. No matter how many times something has been done, it’s always different if you just make it your own. Maybe you can come up with some better scene than this! Don’t give up just because someone made it before. There’s always room for improvement! :slight_smile:

Thanks again for your comments. Take care!