In search of a texture and/or plugin and/or help with it

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Hi Elysiums ! :slight_smile:

this is my very first posting to this forum…

I am looking for “something” – a texture, a texture plugin or … – which do the following:

I want to render “cold things”…and since blender only renders the visual and not the thermodynamic part of our real world, I have to visualize this by applying condensed water to the “cold things”.

Modelling each single drop or streamlet will be far too much work and results in far too many vertice. I am looking for another way to make it real.

I tried different things with specular and reflection texture but everything I got looks …awful.

The basic problem is: It looks alweays flat (not drop-like) and the whole thing looks like covered by water allover (too much reflections).

Does anyone have solved this problem already or has a hint for me to achieve this ?

I thank you all very much in advance for any help and hint ! :slight_smile:

Keep rendering!
mcc

#2

You can achieve it with the Beast script.

A tutorial and a link to the beastscript can be found here:
http://www.mattnelsen.com/beastquickstart.html

After installing and running the script try the following to create drops of water on a surface:

  1. Create a cube (this will be the surface for the drops). Give it a texture as you like.
  2. Create a sphere and scale it down to make a little sphere. Don’t use to many vertices, and set it smooth. Assign a transparent material to it. This will be the drop of water.
  3. In the Beast menu set the mode to General (not Hair and Fur). Select the cube and assign it to Surface in the Beast menu. Select All for Faces in the Beast menu. Now select the little sphere and assign it to Objects in the Beast Menu.
  4. Next you can adjust the Beast settings. Set the Density to 5. Click on Random and set the values as you like.
  5. Click on Unleash Beast! and… voila, a cool cold surface with waterdrops

Let me know if this is what you were looking for.

#3

Hi SoftWork !

Thank you very much for your fast reply ! :slight_smile:

I got the script working ! TADA!

WHAT FOLLOWS IS NO CRITISISM !!!

The script does automatically what I dont want to do by hand: It produces “real drops” in the sense of real existing vertice in a mesh. This gices A LOT to render.And: The drops are uniform – compared with what nature will give us on – for example – a glass with a real fresh cooooool bear :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

The last thing is: Blenders transparency and rendering of glass is not real cool (my opinion) – it is optimized for speed not for realism and photo-like impression.
Yafray is real good with those things – when used in conjunction with YableX.

Without knowing really I would guess that a procedural texture or a texture plugin would do this trick better…but this is only GUESSED !

BUT: I am really impressed of this script! I didn’t know it before and I am sure it will help me very much !

Thank you for your reply and your support !

mcc

#4

OK, so you want to do it with procedural textures or a plugin? That’s also possible.

Try this:

  1. Make a cube. Give it some color if you like.
  2. Duplicate the cube, don’t move it but scale it slightly bigger. Give it a transparent material and enable Ray Transparency for raytracing. Now create a new texture for this material to make the waterdrops. I used the stucci texture with the following settings:
    Wall out, Hard noise, noise size:0.125, Turbulance : 30.
    Map this texture to Normals and set the normal value to 2.5.

I also got some good result with the dots2.dll plugin wich can be found here:http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mein/blender/plugins/texture.html
The settings I used for this plugin are:
size:0.250
noise:0.080
enable smooth and Bump
bumpsize:3

Add some lights and a camera, Raytrace and… voila, procedural waterdrops. But remember that this method only gives simulated 3d (not true 3D) waterdrops, so they won’t show up as shadows.

Let me know if all worked well for you.

#5

Hi ! :slight_smile:

Thank you for your help ! :smiley:

I came across another “problem” – but may be the source of the problem is sitting in front of my monitor…

1.) I think, that not all shapes can be copied
and sized bigger without getting in contact with the original shape. (Yes, I tried ALT-S in EDITmode :wink: )

2.) I have had no success while trying to assign a texture to the “outer shape” (that one which “carries” the drops) which does not influences badly the color/textureing of the “inner shape”.

3.) To make the drops more real, I assigned specular reflections to the “outer shape”. But now not only the drops were specular – the whole outer shape begans to have pecular reflections – especially there, where no drops are. This is no problem in case of rendering a cooooool bear :slight_smile: in a cooool glass :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile: but when you want to render rough surfaces like leaves or pottery you will get problems…

But I think all this is more based on my lack of experience and knwoledge of “tricks” than based on limitations of the renderer…

Keep rendering.
mcc