My first "Real" Project: Digital Camera!

Artwork Works in Progress
1

This is my first “real” project with Blender3D, all my other models have just been little experiments (alot of them I didn’t even bother saving)

I was looking at some of the amazing work on these forums and I thought that I am going to try and make a realistic model of my digital camera. Then I want to make the most photorealistic render I can!

This is where I have got so far: I have made a very basic base, the zoom bit! The inside of the camera lens and the bit you look through! (I don’t know any camera lingo, sorry! :expressionless: ) Please give some tips and advice so I can make this something to be proud of!

http://img234.imageshack.us/img234/6574/camera14rr.th.jpg

http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/4775/camera23yb.th.jpg

The only problem so far, as you can see, is for some reason you can not see through the view finder thing, it’s just black, the only way I can make this work is by putting a light really close to the lenses!

2

wow, this will look cool I think when it is done. Ok 2 things:

  1. Turn OSA on to 8 or 11
  2. good glass (trasparency) has a ray mirror with a depth of 5, thats the basic at least, you will still need to mess with specularity.
    Keep it up, good so far.
3

Thanks for the tips!

The only reason I had OSA off was because I was only doing quick test renders! But I’ll try what you said with the glass, then I’ll render it with OSA on!

4

Ok, I tried what you said, but the glass still doesn’t work properly, I really can’t understand why, I’ve never had this problem before.

I’ve rendered it again with OSA set to 8!

http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/5374/camera39lo.th.jpg

5

could you post the blend file and I’ll help you out?

6

Ok, I’ll upload it, but I need a good site to upload it to. If you know of any?

I’ll appreciate it if you can help me out!

7

out of curiosity, try this. Place an area light between the planes of glass in your model and then re-render. Tell me if you can se inside them now…

reap

8

That what the area light does, I think it looks a lot worse. I can’t really understand why I’m getting this problem?!

http://img129.imageshack.us/img129/2600/cameraarealight4lr.th.jpg

9

I think the reason you can’t see through the viewfinder is that the lighting in the scene is not realistic. Basically no lighting is reaching the inside surface of the viewfinder and that’s why you can’t see it. One light source should be fine because it can bounce of other surfaces and into the viewfinder except that blender does not calculate light like that. One suggestion would be to create a lamp with a very short distance inside the viewfinder to simulate this real-world effect of reflected light or alternatively change the angle of your key light so that it illuminates the viewfinder.

Apart from that wierd problem that looks like a nice start. I’ve tried a camera before but eventually the detail becomes a nightmare. Good luck with this one.

10

Ok, thanks I’ll try that!

11

Hope you dont mind, I mad a quick rendition of your camera and used the transparacy settings I told you about, what do you think:
http://img278.imageshack.us/img278/5779/cameratest8xg.jpg

12

Pretty good! How did you get it to work?

13

Make it ray transparent and use a sun lamp, put AO at 1.25 or so and set the AO samples to 8, then give it a nice render :wink:

14

Ok, thanks, I’ll give it a try!

15

Chuck, check your private nessages box.

16

OK, I’ll send you a PM back!

I havn’t been working on this for the last day or so. I don’t like using Blender all the time, I like to take little breaks to do something else, otherwise I end up messing the project up (rushing it etc.)

I’ll probably do more work to this tommorow!