First time user creating photo realistic medal - bumps/normals/displacements (not working correctly)

Hi guys and girls! This is my first post here and I’m hoping for some help! I’m a first time Blender user and have been modelling a medal for a project at work.

I’m hoping to use it to do some great macro fly-overs of the medal and have been following a number of tutorials online to get me where I am now… see below.

As you can see, the model currently isn’t great. The textures are stretched on the edges, the medal doesn’t look extruded or depressed in the correct way… it just doesn’t look great. I’m a little stumped really on where to go next and was hoping someone here could help me out? I can supply a project file if you’d like a better look at the mess that I’m in!

I’m working from textures and normals etc that I created in CrazyBump.

Would love ANY help or advice please! I’m struggling and my deadline is creeping up on me. As I say - I’m still new to the software so may need a little hand holding for now.

I’m trying to get the medal to as photo realistic as possible please! THANK YOU!

A

Looks like you’re not using displacement (surface seems flat).
Also, when Normal values get too high, extra darkening occurs.

Check, all about displacement…

welcome & enjoy

Thanks for these Burnin. I’ll check them out this morning and will reply with an update on how I get on!

I appreciate your help and your welcome!

EDIT// I’ve given it a go on a new mesh but I’m still not getting the right results? Am I working with a bad displacement map? Texture? Normal? There’s some detail but not much at all which doesn’t echo what others are able to produce with the same technique.

So this is what I get now, using the same method in the video. As you can see, my results are first then their results are second… Not even comparable haha! I can’t figure out what’s going wrong?

I assume object’s UV is not unwrapped?
Yup, better textures will always help with getting better results.

Here’s a quick setup with textures you posted.
medal.blend (1.5 MB)

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Hi Burnin. This looks fantastic, thanks for posting! Much better than my attempt. My object UV is unwrapped which is also very odd why my results aren’t as good as yours.

I’ll try again with better original images and repost soon.

I definitely think it’s due to the texture/original image I’m creating the displacement/normals from is just too low res. I do have a higher quality scan at 600dpi of the image which I could try.

Hello! Me again.

So I managed to find what I thought would be a higher res texture to create my maps from but I’m still getting weird effects with the bumps etc! Screenshot attached.

This is using the project file Burnin supplied which is very odd!

rendertime geometry is controlled only by displacement map - if it was changed, also try changing (lowering) value on multiplier node (refresh interactive viewport to see changes made on geo)