felt like i had to do a project ans so started with something simple. I hope i will get alot of C&C as im trying to improve my skills thanks.
lol 
. I thought this had something to do with animation.
Siegel, your model is very good. Really nice brass material, too. Next you need to work on the texture and the lighting. I assume you are going for a photorealistic image.
The wood: turn down (or turn off) the spec value for the material. If the wood is too dark then, turn up the ref value. Unfortunately, spec doesn’t make wood look polished, just weird.
The keys: unless these are brand new, the part that inserts into the lock should show rounding at the edges where it scrapes against the lock mechanism. The cylindrical key shaft should show some scrapes where it rubs against the face plate of the lock.
Composition: the middle key seems like it is not resting on the wood. Old keys were often kept on large key rings, perhaps add that to the scene, then pose everything on the wood slab? The ring would lift the ends of the keys up so the shadows would be more visible, and give a reason for the key to be off the wood slightly. If they are all on a ring, the “business end” of the keys should all be slightly different, since they would be for different locks. No point to carrying three keys if they all fit the same lock.
thanks for the help Orinoco, ppl for some reason hardly give me any tips.
here is a slight update
Spec altered, ring added(very good idea), some values played with:
Things to do:
Add more keys, add scratches to keys(dono how im gonna manage that), fix the bottom part of the key(its gone all wrong) and maybe add a bit more to the scene.
Any more C&C would be really helpfull
Thanks
Thats lookin good…(I though you meant modeling thru dupliframes or something) Very nice
I did some scraping on an aluminum material by crating a texture type stucci, making the size small (it looked like noise in the preview) then adjusting the xsize value in the Map Input so the noise became streaks. I applied that to the aluminum surface as Nor, and got a bunch of streaky grooves running in one direction. I then made another texture the same way, but adjusted ysize so the second set of streaks ran at right angles to the first set. The crosshatch streaks gave the surface a nice distressed look. It wasn’t exactly like the original, which has thousands of tiny nicks and dings in it from knocking against things in my pocket for years, but the crosshatch streaks are close.
I also ran into this the other day, which tells how to make streaky rings in wood. You might find this interesting, and be able to apply it to making streaks around a couple of spots in the key shaft. You may need to make separate faces at the streaky spot, and use material indices to give them a second version of the brass material, except with streaks.
hows it looking so far? Im not getting as much time to spend on it as i want but want to keep at it till i sort it all out.
This looks pretty cool…
Interesting looking keys…
They look very good. What doors do they open
Those are looking really good. What are you rendering with?(Maybe you could try a hyper-realistic renderer, just to see wut would happen)
peace
Drew
Nice renders, just a technical note, the bits of mortice keys, as you have drawn, are symmetrical like in the previous renders. You do get asymmetrical bits but on safe mortice keys, that have a longer shaft to reach through the 3 or so inches of steel to the lock.
I know it’s a bit pedantic, but thought you may like to know…
That last render is looking very good, but there’s a problem: mortice keys were usually made of iron. Seems there’s a lot of people selling old keys on EBay, and most of them are rusty.
These two pics are typical, and, as you can see, only one in the lot looks like it’s brass. The edges on the tooth plates are sharper than I would have expected, not all rounded down like I thought they’d be, but I was thinking they’d be brass, too, which is a softer metal. Live and learn… :o
here is a yafray test, its not looking so good, probably just need to change a few settings but it takes so long to do test renders :(.
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Here’s me latest update, Ive redone the end of the keys, redid the key ring, and changed the wood slightly, this pic also has some post pro.
I like the new keys, but the old composition. Nice new detail on the key ring. I think the ring needs to overlap more, even with the new loop, like the original ring did. The graininess on the brass looks good. Too much spec on the keys. For the wood, try turning off spec entirely and give it a bit of mirror reflection, about 0.10000 or 0.150.
I like the procedural wood texture, but try to desaturate it a bit.
I agree with Orinoco about the composition.
Also a small amount of dust (as I see in one of your latest images) is a good idea to improve the overall beauty of this image.
do u use tangent shading?
latest update, no post pro
Very nice, the material is excellent. How did you do that?
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