Can anyone give me an idea the best way to texture and light a wording very similar to the crystal Superman logo from the 1978 film poster. I know the original was a painted logo, and I can recreate it in Photoshop in a few hours of intense work… but thought it might be quicker to be able to create the text, texture and lighting setup for a custom text image in the same style as the original. Any idea’s of lighting setup? How many lights, texture settings? etc
It certainly would be an interesting exercise to re-create this … and I’m sure that success would quickly land you a place in *The Gallery" … and I might even encourage you to try. But it’s going to be a continuous exercise in step-by-step building a model and then finding a way to acceptably re-create the many “purely airbrush-artist” things that were done thereafter. Your problems, I daresay, will begin with the letter "S" … look at it very closely.
I have to agree with sundialsvc4, this would be quite a project. Cycles (which I believe you would need for all the transparency) is a physically-based renderer, and nothing in this image matches reality.
For instance, I might use a different material for the front of the letters, lit by an area light. But even so, the reflections across the letters are not consistent: more reflection at the top and bottom, except for the “S” which also has a band across the middle. Some use of a gradient texture as an input to a mix between glossy and transparent shaders perhaps?
For the starbursts, maybe small spheres with an emission shader which you could filter in post. This would give you control of where they appear.
That all said, it would take days if not longer. Certainly not quicker than Photoshop for you. It would be re-usable, though, by changing the text object in Blender and some other tweaking.
I know that the S on the wording has been drawn so that it’s been deformed and bent back and shorter at the top which is why it has the reflection whilst the bottom is lined up with the other letters.
In Photoshop I would normally 3D extrude the wording I’m doing then build up the letter textures by cloning and sampling the Superman wording texture parts. it’s a lengthy process… I might have to just stick with doing it as I have in Photoshop.
Hello GeneralZod,
For this scene you would have to use different view layers or render layers,
As there are three lighting set ups:
-
Where it says ‘Superman’ the light is from directly beneath the text which is the primary light, and there is a small light on the top right side which is there for picking up the highlights.
-
As for ‘The Movie’ the light is just from the front bottom and is giving it a flat look.
-
For the Logo there is one on top which is the main light, the secondary light is on the bottom left hand side and there is also a barely visible tertiary light on the top right hand side.
The Logo is a very simple metallic shader with low roughness,
The extruded part of the text can be selected and be turned into a glass shader,
The front of the text is a bit tricky, there are two ways for this.
-
The easy way to get an almost similar look you could use a Voronoi or noise texture with low detail and a color ramp as a factor for the mix in between the glass and metal shader.
-
Or the hard way would be that you use the gradient shader turned to radial and move it using a mapping node and then factor the glass and metal, you would have to do this multiple times for every letter separately.
But that would be how I would go about creating this.
Hope I did not insult your intelligence.
Thanks for the question, I really like analyzing lighting and texturing
Keep Blending 
1 Like