Here’s a conga model I’m working on. It took me about four days to get the geometry as you see it (which tells you much about my unfamiliarity with Blender.) For the head I will probably map a photo of a real drum head. The body will have a blue wood stain material but I want to create several drums with different body colors. I’m not there yet as this is a work-in-progress.
What I would like to do is apply a dark reflective material to the hardware such as brushed nickel and I’d like some advice. Now it’s too dark to show any detail on the lug plates and generally looks bad. Is there a tutorial site or other resource for metallic materials in Blender?
By the way, I’ve learned a lot on this project, just in constructing the drum. I feel inspired to make a series of ethnic percussion and develop a larger materials library.
there is a blender repository see http://www.blender-materials.org/
you can download the .blend files of all sorts of materials from there and then file->append the material in the blend file to your congos.
one better than that would be to go thorugh the BSOD materials doc, that will teach to to be able to make your own materials… see link , second last entry.
Four days was not enough. Here’s an update. I developed a wood material today and after much trial and error (F12 button is still hot) also figured out how to apply a displacement map to make seams between “staves”. I applied my work-in-progress bronze/brass material from the cymbal project to the drum hardware. If I ever make my own drums, I will have bell bronze for the hardware. Once I get it right it will look very sharp.
So now the problem with the bronze/brass material is the weird speculars and reflections that Tangent V causes. I like the way it’s supposed to look and want it for the material, but it really looks off on the drum rim. Any ideas? I did ctrl-n and removed doubles on the rim mesh.
The wood material also needs a little ray mir so it looks lacquered. I might do a color change on it (mine are really blue) but I can’t think of an easy way to do that aside from manually changing each color setting in the material. Any ideas on that?
