General help with my ugly render

Hi all,

I am trying to make my own version of the image on the left. It doesn’t need to look exact, I just want something similar.

In my version I wanted the main cylinder to be a black rubbery texture, and I changed a few other small things. In general, it is just really ugly but I don’t know what to change. I was hoping to get some advice on making this look better in general.

I’m not an artist. This is just meant to be a nice-looking picture of a sensor I use in my lab. So I am using Blender Render because I don’t need it to look super realistic. I also don’t want shadows or anything that would make the image less clear.
Any ideas or tips on textures/colors or even lighting?

Side Note: the resolution of the white lines (magnetic field lines) looks pretty low, but I maxed that out when I did the bevel. Any tips on that as well?

The “magnetic field lines” look very nice – good job on that.

Well, the way I see it, you need a (probably, procedural …) texture to depict the horizontal pattern on the cylinder. The texture might be “UV-mapped” to the cylinder to control its positioning. And, there would be a “bump map” to cause that material to appear to be three-dimensional without requiring it to actually be so – by altering the path of light that bounces off the surface. (It’s simply not worth it to try to do actual geometry.)

Then, you need a nice aluminum metal material. Read some tutorials about Eevee (or, Cycles, but I’d use Eevee) “material nodes.” A video is worth a thousand words on this topic. There are also libraries of ready-made contributed materials available for free – to borrow, and/or to learn from.

You can also see from the reference photo that there were at least two point light sources, one directly behind the camera and one about a right-arm’s length to the side. (Undoubtedly a classical “three-point” lighting setup, probably using soft-boxes.)

The so-called “diffuse color” of the object can be seen by looking at the top of the object, while the “specular color” is the color of the shiny reflections. I think that if you sampled the RGB value of these pixels you’d find that the spec is not quite “white.” (I think it’s always a good idea to measure from a reference photo.)

The bevels on this object are very tiny: the lid is clearly machined, and the only beveling is at the edges of this machined surface and likewise at the top of the “cup.”

Hope this rambling gives you some pointers in the right directions . . .

Aluminium doesn’t have diffuse, only glossy. And since it’s glossy, you can’t rely on taking samples unless you have the same environment.

The original appears to have actual ribs modeled. You can to some extent fake it using an anisotropic shader (use it anyway for the rib faces even if modeled - I would), then work on the chamfered edge. If you want the top face to look polished, either adjust the aniso values for this or use a standard glossy shader. Again, also the environment it lives in matters.

Note that in Eevee anisotropic shader doesn’t work (yet?).

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