I am currently in the process of modelling the Rudolfskrone, the crown used by he austrian emperors and starting from the mid 1800 being the official crown of the austrian empire. Being an austrian this seem to be fitting …
I thought I might get some valuable input here and decided to open a wip for this project.
In the current stage I focus on the basic modelling, just to get the shapes and proportions right. The next stage will be to ‘humanize’ to too perfect modelling and give it a more handcrafted touch.
After that the long road of texturing and setting up the materials will consume a lot of time.
This project is exclusively targeted for luxrender.
This project is a fun project and I am doing it to teach me discipline to stay with the roadmap and not to stray afar doing things that I like more (like material setup) while the modelling lacks. I think this is necessary :yes:
See below a picture taken from the treasury in vienna where it is exhibited to see what I am aiming for and some test renders of the current stage. Keep in mind that there is almost no focus on the materials yet.
Looks real good. I couldn’t believe the last one was a render.
Its really frustating when you can’t get good reference images. I’ve been in those situations as well
When I first saw this I was almost unsure of which one was the reference and which was the modeled one. Now I think if you did a side by side it would be very difficult to tell the difference.
I would go there for you and make pictures, but I guess according to this you need a special permit to do that. Also entrance fee isn’t really that cheap
I tried various approaches and techniques and selected for this the ‘diamond tray’ as I call it.
Unfortunately the geometry is for some reason not suitable to bake the displacement from a highres mesh to the low poly one ( I get strange artefacts), so I had to use normal map baking, which raises the problem of how to generate the bump suitable for lux, as lux does not take normal maps but only bump maps.
This is an area where I have still to find a satisfying ( and predictable) workflow.
The gold material is now a mix of 2 variants of shinymetal and a glossy material to simulate dirt. Mixing is controlled through procedurals and maps generated from an AO baking.
The clamp material is a mix material too, where I texture painted the material mask (stencil). This is a very straightforward workflow and I will have to use it a lot for quite a few pieces on the crown.
The highlighted area shows the part which I worked on.
Thanks guys for the encouragement, it is very well received.
next update.
I worked on the small lilies and on the relief on the mitra.
Actually this gave me quite a headache, as I ran into some strange bump mapping issues in combination with subdivision and uv mapping, where the unwrapped mesh extends beyond the limits of the mapped image. I will discuss at the luxrender forum.
