Lighting and texture Help Please

Support Materials and Textures
#1

Hello

I made a model a few days ago and I am really satisfied with how it turned out ( I still got a bit of tweaking to do but its pretty much done.) I’m not very good at 3D art so I’m pretty happy with the result and I want to make this model my first serous project and that means i need to get some good lighting and a nice material for the mesh . Thats where I need your help. I have no idea how to make or get a nice material and I’m even more clueless on how to create a nice lighting setup. So can anyone point me in the right direction? I have checked the blender open material repository (http://matrep.parastudios.de/) and couldn’t find anything that worked for my model.

This is my modelhttp://photos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs151.snc1/5620_1031983018439_1791328371_73307_1320694_n.jpg

#2

you think your gonna find some procedural material that you can drop on this thing and have it look remotely decent? lol. I can tell you right now on a model like that, the texturing will take significantly longer than the modeling if you want it to look good. You will have to paint our own texture using photos and brushes in 2d software (like photoshop). I’d look into learning how to UV map.
As for lighting, we would need to know what type of thing you are trying to make. Are you going to build a scene around that or is it just going to be a lone model over a plain background? If its just a simple setup to showcase your model typically a single point light with some ambient occlusion looks fine.

#3

I have spent days playing with the material settings and the node system and I haven’t gotten anything good so I really don’t know where to turn because I have no idea what it is that I was doing wrong. As for the lighting I had a 3 point (+) setup.

#4

Go to Shading (F5) -> World Buttons -> Amb Occ and turn on Ambient Occlusion. 24 samples should result in a nice smooth effect. It’s like magic.

This, for example, is just the default Material (with Spec set to 2, no other changes) and a default light. Looks fancy enough to me.

Oh, another thing: go to Scene (F10) -> Render and find the sampling for anti-aliasing. It should say Gauss. If you switch that to CatRom, your renders will come out sharper.

#5

Playing with the material settings is called working with the shading. If you want to texture this item (ie make it have color and detail) then you will not accomplish this by “playing with material settings.” You need to learn how to UV map. Texturing involves painting and compositing on your flat UV template in a 2d image manipulation app like photoshop or GIMP, then wrapping that image around your 3d object. You have two things to learn here: UV mapping and texture painting.