So I’m trying to make a great looking gear for compositing in to a steampunk photoshoot I’ll be doing soon. But I’m having trouble making my gear textures look right. Here is my first test.
I would really like them to look like this photos:
I know the tangent option makes the spectral look more metalic but haven’t got it to rotate around the center of the gear like in the flickr photo above. And I’m using ramp to try and make the wavy gradient pattern show up but no luck yet. Any advice or examples yall could show me?
Thanks, looks like it’s got some helpful stuff in it. But not exactly what I want. Looking to make more of a shiny gear not so much a matte one with simple blurred reflection. In case anyone is interested - I made the shapes for the gears in Inkscape using a tutorial I found online then imported and used them as curves to make the gears. Never thought making gears could be so fun.
The biggest thing you need is an environment to reflect in the gears. The reason they appear so flat now is that there is nothing for them to reflect. Look for a nice .HDRI texture to use in your environment, and then try using an anisotropic shader in cycles. This will allow you to get the directional reflections like you get on stainless steel.
Also, little texture detail can go a long ways. Some extra bumpiness from the casting process or dirt buildup in cracks can really help sell the look, even when you are trying to get a clean look.
I avoid cycles because of the looong render times in order to get rid of grainy samples but I went ahead and was very happy with my results, even though it took 8 hours to render at 600 samples, and still has visible samples!
