Lift interior


For reasons that will become clear I’ve been up all night modelling this lift interior. There will eventually be an actor bluescreened into this scene (I’ve shot from two angles to get the reflection.)


Test render. Not quite happy with the lighting yet.

Hmm reminds me of mass effect 2…dunno why…
Why are the buttons the names of the months?

Cool elevator.

Thanks DDD! I could tell you about the buttons - but then I’d have to kill you :wink:

I haven’t played ME2. I wasn’t really thinking about ME1 either but I suppose it has plenty of blue-lit metallic spaceship interiors that might look similar. Almost every FPS features an elevator at some point…


[anamorphic PAL]

OK. I’ve started bringing in the bluescreen images & made a few adjustments to the metal textures and lighting. Question: my metal panels on this side of the mirror are normal-mapped, but their reflections in the mirror are not. Does anyone have a cure for this?

Err, reflections dont have normals…they are reflections…erm not sure what you mean there…
As for the blue screen thing…the guys in the elevator looks wrong somehow, while the reflection is good.
The actual dude is poorly filmed though imo, maybe it is the lighting that he was filmed in…
Cuz he looks kind of like he is progected with a sepian style…or just plain yellow light or something, while the elevator is all colorful and more blue…i dunno…

I think what he means is that the normal maps show up on tge wall, but not in the reflection of the wall.

I have an object that has a baked normal map and a bump map, interestingly the baked normal map will show up in a mirror when rendered, the bump map will not. Just like when you view the model textured in the 3d window, the normal map will show, but not the bump map.

Randy

Thanks for all your comments. DDD - agreed, haven’t colour balanced the footage yet. tlehmann: yes, that’s exactly the problem I’m having. randy: sounds like you’ve got the opposite to me. Is there a mirror setting I’ve missed?


Still haven’t solved the mirror/normal mapping issue, and still working on colour balancing the fully lit screens. Here’s a frame from a sequence with the lights dimmed.

Sorry to not get back to this… Terminology might be a problem, as I hear the terms ‘bump map’ and ‘normal map’ thrown around quite a bit. To me, a normal map is baked in blender to capture hi poly detail and apply it to a low poly model (usually a blueish image with some reds & greens mixed in) and a bump map is a gray scale image where white is raised, black is depressed areas of the mesh (or the other way around). So what does your normal map look like?

Randy

Randy: thanks for clarifying. Based on your descriptions what I’m using is a bump map not a normal map: it’s a grey scale image of the raised dot pattern on the metal panels that you can see in the foreground. I’ve been (erroneously) calling it a normal map as I’m using this texture to influence normals rather than colour or any other influence parameters.

OK, first let me say I’m not an expert at this stuff. In the attached screen shot I have a character I’m working on. Bottom left is the character textured, the details around the scales on the body aren’t modelled, they are baked from a high poly sculpt. Above that is the normal map blender baked for me. On the right top is the mesh without any textures, as you can see there is no detail from the normal map because it’s not textured. Bottom right is the bump map. The bump map doesn’t display in the 3d view but renders just fine and makes the white area of the fins look raised.


So when I read about this problem, I added a plane with a chrome material on it behind the character (to act as a mirror) and rendered it. The normal map textures appeared in the mirror, but not the bump maps. And that’s about all I know about it, normal maps render a reflection and bump maps don’t from what I can see. I think there is a plug in for photoshop from nvidia for making normal maps, and I think there is one for gimp, never used them.

I think your best bet would be to post this problem in the texturing support section. I personally like the texture you’re using, a simple grid pattern but it adds depth, makes the walls more interesting. I think the whole project is looking good, I’m interested also in why the buttons have the months and not floors on them, very much like to see this finished!

Randy

Thanks for trying this out Randy - at least I know I’m not imagining things! and nice fish by the way - what’s it for? I posted on the texturing forum and found out this is simply a limitation of the internal render engine, so now I have to decide if it’s worth switching to vray or povray at some point, or using some other solution. I could also try bypassing the whole reflection thing altogether and use a mirror image modifier instead.

Taking the textures in the example, obviously the normal map texture is set to influence the normals. Which parameter is the bump map set to influence?

Sorry to be high-jacking your wip thread, but since we are discussing this here, might as well continue, perhaps others can find it useful. This fish is just for educational purposes, I created a complete how-to video tutorials on the subject, from sculpting to modelling & retopology, to texturing, to rigging, I’m currently working on finishing face rigging, then will do animation as well. The whole thing can be found here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=198052

The bump map is set to ‘normals’ in ‘influence’ panel of the texture panel. The normal map is set to ‘normals’ in ‘influence panel’ as well as being set to ‘normal map’ in the ‘image sampling’ panel of the texture panel. I wasn’t even sure if I could use both on the same model, turns out with the bump map texture first, normal map texture 2nd in the texxture slots it worked.

Really, your texture looks to be a simple grid pattern, and all the panels to your lift appear to be the same size except the one on each side of the buttons. So you could create a 2 square by 2 square grid mesh and use an array modifier to make the mesh for the entire panel. Then bake a normal map for the panels, I’d do that all in a separate file so you could edit it later if need be and so you don’t have all that geometry in your base file that you are rendering & working with.

I don’t have any experience with external renderers, so to me this would be the easiest way, but if you have used external renderers before then maybe that would be the easiest way, I dunno.

Randy

The missing reflection of bump maps is a known bug. Some say it is present since the introduction of ray tracing in Blender (since version 2.32?), others say it is a bug of Blender 2.5 as Blender 2.49 seems to handle it without a problem. See this thread:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=191261&page=1

So you could try to use Blender 2.49. To me that has the enourmous downside that the render in 2.49 is slower and I have to use two Blender versions to get a job done.

RayBlender

@Randy and @RayBlender: hi! I kind of transferred this question over to the texturing forum and have just learned that there is a check box - somewhere! - in 2.5 that reverts to the old 2.49 bump mapping algorithm, which apparently works fine in a mirror. As my set-up is fairly straightfoward my options are a) old bump mapping algorithm, b) delete the mirror plane and model the reflection using geometry (e.g. with mirror image modifiers) c) bake some proper normal maps or possibly d) use an environment map rather than raytraced reflection.

As I encountered the same problem as you did, I was wondering if there is indeed a possibility to use the old bump mapping algorithm. I did not find a button labelled “use old bump mapping” or something like this. Instead I found a check box “normal map” in the “image sampling” section of the texture buttons. The texture is indeed visible in the reflections, but I found that this also severely affects the texture. I tried to compensate for this effect by using “darken” instead of “mix” in the “influence” section of the texture buttons. In the image below I have compared the methods.


I guess that I have to modify the texture so that the result with the old bump mapping algorithm resembles the effect of the new bump mapping algorithm.