Letters Standing out?

Support Basics & Interface
1

Ok, i dont have the image on hand, but this is off my soap bar thing for anyone that remembers.

I have a pinkish Soap Bar, i am trying to achieve a similar effect to the whole FightClub feel… for anyone who has seen that movie. For those who havent, its a bar of soap with the look of carved out (or more bumped out) letters that are part of the soap bar.

Now through the help of the blender community, i got the letters to look as part of the soap. Everyone suggested various ways and finally i was pointed to the most simple, which i ended up using. Which was to simply combine the two.

Now i modified that a bit to not mess up my mesh, and simple gave the letters and the soap the same material.

Now aside from problems with the soap and bubbles themselves, the letters are insanely hard to see!

I toyed a ton with lighting but i cannot get it to look right, the shadows help, but none the less the letters look so exactly the same as the soap, the letters do not stand out at all. So anywhere they are not overlyshined apon by light, or given big shadows, its an invisible part with no depth.

Any ideas on what i could do? I want the letters to look like they are made of the same soap as the bar, so i dont think i can change the color of the letters… but none the less they match too well. And i tried various ways of lighting, just trying to figure it out, and the best i came up with was putting some lights on the same layer as the text and making them only shine on the text… but then it looks like the soap is being shined heavily on by lights, and the bar isnt… which is weird. And ofcourse, if i do the same thing with the bar included, the text is again, basically invisible.

Thanks to any comments!

2

Please post the pic of your best result yet.
I’m not a lighting expert, but these are things I would try:

  • Let lights cast shadows!
  • Place the keylight to the side of the bar.
  • Some lighting setup to make parts between the letters receive less light than parts that are directly exposed to lights. AO?

It also depends on how you want it look. I Googled some very different pics:


The letters appear metallic (different material) and don’t have foam on them.

http://www.kropserkel.com/fightclub.htm
Have you beveled the edges of the letters? They might help to “catch” speculars.

3

i’ll post it tonight, but mine looks more like the 1st image, where the letters are a bit over highlighted… but mine is more extreme… I dunno…

Maybe i should just focus on just adding more bubbles which i planned on doing and doing it in key areas. So i’ll give that a try and also post a new topic about my lackluster bubbles that look more like water dropplets than bubbles.

Thanks :slight_smile:

4

I would darken the letters colors by doing a couple different things.

  1. add a material to that object so the one mesh has multiple materials.

  2. the second material, give it a darker shade of pink or whatever you are using now.

  3. Or just keep it the same color, but change the materials’s reflectiveness to something less, so it’s different from the outer soap mesh.

This is a cheat and lighting is full of cheats, both in 3D and on real film and photography sets. Of course it’s not really a cheat, but a way to get around certain limitations of your lighting setup.