This is a quick 3 hour mock up of an English Wheel rendering I was playing with.
This image uses Global Illumination (one of the best ways to light IMO), and a little bit of edging (setting to 2) to get a nice illustrative quality look.
For those of you who don’t know, an English Wheel is a large polished metal wheel, with a smaller “anvil”, or metal wheel on the bottom. Sheet metal is rolled between these wheels, and it stretches and smooths out. It’s used in metalshaping, for example, to make motorcycle fenders by hand.
English Wheel
I’m not sure why the back metal looks a little “fuzzy”, maybe it’s the combination of OSA and edge shading at the same time? Or a lighting problem. I does it mainly when I activate edges.
This was done using the new Blender 2.31a.
Could you post a closeup of the “welds”. I’m curious to know how you did them. I’ve seen them done automatically by software like AutoCAD (iirc) but I don’t recall ever seeing them in blender, and its a very important and realistic detail. Are you building the base for it as well? These things are usually on some kind of wheel assembly if I’m not mistaken.
Actually the welds are nothing special, they are simple arcs formed from a cube, with a stucco type texture on them, and moved into place. The effect is good enough at this distance
A better weld would actually be a properly beveled cube.
This is meant to be a small vise- mounted unit, so there is not base, I will be modeling a vise instead.
The arc idea is good so long as the throat is thicker than the parent material, just place a texture with a recurring “C” pattern on it, it’ll be an arc-weld, a beveled cube profile(convex) will give you weak points at toe(were it joins the box tube) resulting in cracking from the constant flexing.
I downloaded the Blender build that supports basic raytracing, here’s a raytraced pic of the wheel, edge rendering also turned off. Raytracing works pretty good.
