In my ongoing quest for “something different” I wanted to do a somehwat detailed sci-fi scene but to achieve the super small details through multiple nor maps. Here are the results of this exercise:
Minimal postprocessing here: noise added (3%) and image rotated 90 degrees right - I just thought it looked better that way
A look at the meshes:
No subsurfs to be found in this one Grids were used as the basis of the mesh, and some serious vertice pushing continued from there. OSA was minimal at 5. One material with all 8 texture channels were used with varied values of nor, specularity, etc… Displacement isn’t quite helping for me yet, so this is all standard Blender Nor at work. There are three lamps in the scene, two ray tracing, one regular, all three in different colors (white, gray, blue respectively) and different energy values (ranging from 1.5 down to .5). I used cube mapping for the textures, which I created in Paint Shop Pro (very simple lines and boxes mostly). It rendered quickly, so as I move into animation in the future I might use this somehow for that.
I recently started making a font that relates to this sort of design, called ‘panel’, and once i finish, i will put up for general use. It’s for doing just this sort of thing, but the idea is, you just start on any flat surface, and basically type in the panel details. Each letter/number on the keyboard becomes a surface of a panel, so with a hundered or so different panel types in an alphabet, you can look pretty random. You could practically chunk out the death star with a single alphabet. And of course you can adjust the depth and bevel, or convert to curve or mesh or whatever. So far i have made about 20 characters.
Cool complex btw Robert.
Interesting idea, but I think, Robertt, your finished image lacks definition. It is nothing more than a bunch of shapes now, meaning, the eye is not able to find anything useful in all of those shapes. Maybe with a better lighting, this could be more interesting. But right now it’s just something strange.
rafael: Thank you very much! There are about seven major meshes which have a lot of polygonal details. It was a very different approach for me, using almost exclusively face mode, and I was encouraged by the interesting results.
Modron: Thanks man. That font sounds cool. What are you using to design it?
Jerri: You may be right While I usually aim for clarity and definition, this one I did want the feeling of “what end is up?” since this is a view presumably from a spacecraft approching the alien complex. Maybe in a flyby animation would be cool. Thanks for the feedback!
Modron, that sounds good I look forward to seeing it. I should probably upgrade to the real full Photoshop one day. I’m using Photoshop Elements I also have the GIMP, which is great and powerful, but the extra PS stuff probably comes in handy.
Grids were used as the basis of the mesh, and some serious vertice pushing continued from there. OSA was minimal at 5. One material with all 8 texture channels were used with varied values of nor, specularity, etc… Displacement isn’t quite helping for me yet, so this is all standard Blender Nor at work. There are three lamps in the scene, two ray tracing, one regular, all three in different colors (white, gray, blue respectively) and different energy values (ranging from 1.5 down to .5). I used cube mapping for the textures, which I created in Paint Shop Pro (very simple lines and boxes mostly). It rendered quickly, so as I move into animation in the future I might use this somehow for that.
I’ll have to try that sometime. Thanks for the feedback!
I also have the GIMP, which is great and powerful, but the extra PS stuff probably comes in handy.