Yup, some ballpoint pens. I modeled it after a BiC pen.
I dont know how to fix the image texture though; its too blurry. I even put the filter down to .1 ( is that right? for making it sharper? ) Its 1200 by 96 px image, so i dont really think its resolution.
Anyway, I have ang-map ( grace-probe ) and AO with sky texture light, and one area light. Samples on the lamp and AO are maxed and its still griany ( possibly due to the image colour AO )
Rendered with blender internal + gamma correction. ( via blender )
the models and materials are great. period. however if there is one thing that’s stopping it to look like a photograph, it’s the pen-caps. i can’t pinpoint what’s wrong with them. maybe their tips, they look too smooth.
and one more thing, about AO. i don’t understand why people tend to use the higest setting even when not neccessary. i thought AO using sky texture setting was needed when u are rendering outdoors. for a scene like this, i would use plain AO or maybe sky color. however, i am still kinda n00b, so correct me if that is not the right thing to do.
The blur is probably coming from the Ambient occlusion. I would put a highter value in the Sample box. To improve the render I would also add a sligh bump to the wood and reduce it on the pen caps. (just add nor to the wood and reduced the nor value for the pen caps)
i think the texture on the lids is a bit too shiny and not dark enough and thats why it seems unrealistic. also try enabling random sampling in ao
I disagree, they aren’t nearly shiny enough. They are far too diffuse. Look at a pen lid, it is very smooth + shiny plastic.
Similarly, the rest of the materials on the pens look quite diffuse. The plastic bit before the ball-point and the main ‘barrel’ are fine, they don’t need to be all shiny.
Other than that, nice pic. It looks a little blurred, though. Try sharpening the AA (change the filter, perhaps trent .95)
The red color isn’t too bad, but the blue- to use a term we used when I was in illustration classes at school- the blue is too “out of the tube”. Meaning the color is too saturated. If this were a painting, I would suggest mixing a bit of yellow ocre or something into the blue paint to knock down the saturation of the straight “out of the tube” blue. I’m looking at a blue bic pen exactly like the one modelled here right now, and the color is quite a bit less saturated than depicted here.
Really good job, though- very convincing. To me the blue color is about all that doesn’t seem quite right about it. You could probably bump the red down a bit, too.
Materials: By looking at the pen, it IS sort of shiney, with a slight ‘noisyness’ to it. But I dont actually have a blue or black pen, so I just guessed. I think black is ok, but I used another blue pen for estimating the blue colour. And it was pretty much a solid BLUE. I tried lowering saturation a bit in this update.
Modeling: In the lid, its hard to see the detail in the front from the first shot, so i’ll blow that up.
I measured every part in millimeters and used the edge length feature. One cm is 1 blender unit, and one mm is .1 unit. ( since blenders units and metric are both 10 based, this works well. ) So its pretty much to-scale. I did notice an error in the lid myself; the top faces on the ring is supposed to be slanted downwards.
Everything is beveled. Where the clip on the lid is, got a bit tricky, so not everything THERE is beveled. But on the real thing, the bottom of the clip is pretty sharp anyway. :-?
And here are some large(1024 768) pictures of the lid.
I think in the next update, at the risk of streached wood texture, I’ll make a bigger render, so you can see the writing on the pen.
I think i like the first blue myself. And sorry for the jpeg compression, although it seems to affect red more than anything. ( in other pictures too )
one more small thing- if they are not a felt tip pen, which it is not as u have said these are ball point pen, the writing tips should be more reflective, shiny and maybe should have some ink on the front of the point.
