I thought I’d try to make the robot b-9 from lost in space (the tv show) , to teach myself a lil more about modeling. Seemed like an easy thing to model. I plan to animate it over the top of video, hence the photo background for the test render.
There are a couple things i’m having trouble with.
The first is the two ridges that run vertically across the body peice. I’m not sure how to make them correctly. I’m trying to do it with extrusion. I draw the line that follows the body, extrude it to the side, then extrude all of that with scale. But the top level of the
ridge doesn’t fit right…
secondly, ribbed glass. The collar of the robot is ribbed glass like you might see in a light fixture. I made the ridges with normal mapping because i didn’t want all the verts of actual modeled tiny ribs.
When not oversampled, it looks as blocky as u might expect… but when i turn on oversampling, and move the camera back far enough, it simlply looks like clear glass. is there a way to over ride the oversampling settings of a material, or is there some other way to accomplish this effect? Should i bite the bullet and model the ridges?
any other comments and crits are greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried reducing the frequency of the ribs, and i tried making a whole new image texture, but to no avail. I’m starting to think that the effect i’m looking for isn’t going to happen with bump mapping. I think the reason the glass ribs become so visible is because light passes through more than one rib before hitting the camera, which wont happen with bump maps.
I’ve tried faking it by modifying alpha based on the texture map but that doesn’t work so well either. I think i’m gonna have to model it.
I’m generally not happy with the level of realism for the whole bot. I’m hoping i can fix that with better materials.
Yeah, it’s because anti-aliasing and oversampling blur out your bump map the further away it gets. It’s a mip-map thing. It gets worse when it’s on an angle, because then it has to crunch mip-maps side-ways, and it doesn’t account for vivid detail, it just selects rows of pixel and blurs them together.
Ok so i decided to model it , no bump mapping this time. still getting the same problem from a distance. But even close up i’m not getting the effect i’m after. In the origonal the ribs turn almost white , in my model that effect is just barely visible. Does anyone have any idea how i can increase that effect?
To get the ribs to show on a far distance u need to render at a higher resolution. When you subsample something the phenomena “moire effect” will show up, subsample occurs if the sample frequency is less than double of the source frequency. In other words, you need to render at higher resolution to make the ribs visible, or position the camera closer to the robot, or reducing the amount of ribs.
Thanks a lot for the reply.
I was kind of hoping for a moire effect though, but all i’m getting a clear glass effect. What i am looking for is a way to make the ribs, even close up (where the effect doesn’t come into play) more pronounced. The mirroring that takes place on the inner surface just isn’t showing up the way it should and I dont know how to fake it properly.
What’re your glass settings? You need certain settings to get the right effect. I don’t know if you know this, but you need to turn on RayMir and have a high fresnel setting if you want internal reflection.
it also might be that you are rendering perfect glass, and there is no such thing in the real world. Try adding a very slight cloud texture to the glass mapped to grey. It will dull the glass down a bit and make it more…seeable (if that’s a word)
My only other crit is that the robot has been through alot, saving Dr. Smith time and time again. So he needs some scratches and grunge as textures over the material. See the BlenderNation about hard surface modeling for help.
Thanks a lot for all the replies and suggestions. I didn’t even realize till now that blender has alternate antialiasing filters. I’m off to try these suggestions. if it helps i’m posting a pic of my material settings.
oops :o
when i remodeled the collar peice, i forgot to make an inner layer to the glass so there was nothing to cause an internal reflection. Its still not quite right but i think its a lighting issue maybe. On to the textures now.
