“Money’s just paper but affects people like poetry”
I had a lot of fun doing this one and here’s a short breakdown.
The first step was creating the banknotes - I used a curve to fold the paper as needed and then manually created a few copies and tweaked them. I was thinking about using geometry nodes, but I wasn’t sure how to control the bending of each instance, so I decided to go manual on this one. For the textures, I found scanned images of authentic USD banknotes. I played around with the images in Photoshop to create a simple bump map which I later used to create some details.
I added fingerprints on the banknotes using an imperfection image from poliigon. I had the issue where all banknotes had identical fingerprints and avoided it by plugging the random socket (Object info) into the rotation socket in the mapping node.
I did the rubber band by hand using a curve with low resolution and a simple profile, nothing too fancy. It’s not the most realistic-looking rubber band but I’m happy with the result. I also played around with the tilt of the curve to add some visual interest.
For the writing on the banknote, I used Procreate to handwrite the text and exported it as a transparent png which I mixed with the banknote shader. Overall, the banknote shader is quite a mess, but here’s a screenshot of how it looks:
The lighting in this scene was the most important step, so I spent a lot of time on this one. I don’t have any particular pattern or advice to give on this one, just playing around with different settings did the job.
The final step was to add some more details and used geometry nodes to add some fuzz. The setup is pretty basic.
For the final render, I used 3000 samples, 1800x1800px. I also increased the diffuse and glossy to 8 in the light paths for a better result.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the result. I was aiming for a mixture of realism and surrealistic look.
Also, this is the first time I’m doing a breakdown of my process, so let me know if it helps. I hope that it gives good ideas.
You can check other stuff on my IG: https://instagram.com/licheff.dz