Buck knife - last update

This is my first post so please be patient if a mess something up.

Here is my latest project in Blender. The composition was done with The GIMP.

http://www.nmt.edu/~jberg/gallery/fullsize/folding_knife.jpg

Any comments would be appreciated.

looks like the source, put it somewhere now!

give it some more realistic lighting and it will spanktasticily amazingnessarficially incredible!

On the other hand, you could leave it as is.

Nay

looks like the source, put it somewhere now!

I don’t understand what you mean, put the .blend file somewhere?

About the lighting – I’m still learning Blender. This project was mostly about modeling. I’ll get the hang of lighting eventually.

no the knife, like on a wooden desk… something like that

Excellent modeling there, very impressive.

One question: Why does the source image look exactly like a blender screenshot? It looks identical to to the knife.

I guess I didn’t put the knife on a desk or something because I was focusing on the modeling. The source photo looks like a blender screen shot because I laid it on some graph paper to take the picture.

If you look close at the real image you’ll see that there’s engraving on the knife blade. I tried to reproduce it with a bump map, but the edge of the bumping image was visible. (I just added it as texture and positioned it with an empty.)

Here’s a render of what I was trying to do on the blade:
http://www.nmt.edu/~jberg/gallery/knifewithdecal.jpg

Anyone know how to get it to work?

Thanks everyone for the comments.

i’d UV map it into place, it’d be pretty easy.

I think, but im not sure, that some bump mapping in blender uses a nuetral grey for the 0 value, and raises and lowers from that. If thats the case, make the background of the bumpmap grey or 0 alpha… sorry i can’t test it at the moment

The model and the textures are very nice! But there is something that disturbs my eye. The oval hole in the blade is so sharp. If you look at the photo you find that the edges are beveled, aren’t they? It would give your great model even more credibility.

I am not sure about the bump map. I am Blender beginer myself. Different ranges of the picture might help. I mean not from white to black, but backgroud medium gray and bumps white or black. Gotta try…

Create your text as a TGA or other format that supports alpha channels. Use black text and set the alpha channel mask so that it masks out all but the text (visually this would look like a black frame with white text).

Load this as a texture for the knife blade, set the texture to UseAlpha and switch from Repeat to Extend. In the material Texture Mapping Map To buttons, turn of Col and turn on negative Nor (the Nor button will be in yellow). Set the Nor parameter to some appropriate value for the depth. In the Map Input buttons, use the osf parameters to move the texture to the appropriate spot and the sizeX and sizeY buttons as needed.

You can also use Face Select and UV texturing for placing the text. Both will work.

Hope this helps.

it looks great but definitaly needs some surroundings

mystery

I added some surroundings (though not very interesting surroundings) and tried to round the hole a little bit.

Thank you DStone for your advice, it worked great. The Extend button was what I needed. I tried UV mapping before, but I had trouble figuring it out.

Hope everyone likes these:

http://www.nmt.edu/~jberg/gallery/knife2.jpg

close-up of decal:
http://www.nmt.edu/~jberg/gallery/knifedecalfixed.jpg

wow, that’s impressive! You should add a bit of rust or something, turn up the spec, and add some raymir on the knife blade. Right now the knife material looks like plastic, or the regular material with increased specularity.

I really like it - nice structure on the blade an the grip.

I tried to fix the materials and lighting. I’m still learning how to make realistic metal.

This will probably be my last update, so enjoy:
http://www.nmt.edu/~jberg/gallery/knife3.jpg

wow that can easily be mistaken for a real knife, nice job

I think the material settings for the blad are right, it looks like stainless steal now. It looks like a show-model-knife know, like in the shop. Very nice. Maybe add some displacement or bumpmapping for the wood. I looks too much like a picture

Walibie

Perhaps that is because it is a picture :smiley: (made with blender :P)