After looking at another artist’s model I was intrigued by straight razors. Since I am attempting to get a better understanding of materials and texture applications and techniques I thought this model would be fun to apply some of what I’ve learned. Simple boolean subtraction for the file work on the knife spine.
Blender 2.79 is amazing with the denoising and filmic color management. My post processing has gone to almost zero now.
Here are some test renders for my weekly challenge entry. I really struggled on the composition. I am not sure I picked the best layout for the render but also didn’t want to spend a lot of time on a simple project. More practice for material application and texturing. I am not very good yet but slow improvements.
Complete failure. Created the model for a cnc pattern. Pattern came out terrible and it would need a ton of tweaks to fix so shelving this project. The details are too fine for a 1/16 in carving bit unless the carving is 3ft long. Not practical.
Applied some basic materials and rendered for fun. It did not come out half bad as a render.
Newest cnc pattern model for my pattern library. Rendered with matcap material to simulate an illustration and then textured post processed. Second version with cycles render and different textures.
Still trying to improve. I really liked this one even though I was too lazy to re-position the pilot in the second copy though I may at some future time. Post processed size and color for second ship.
Something a little different. Made this model for a cnc pattern but didn’t like how it came out. It really wasn’t what I had in my mind as a pattern. Now as a render I think it came out okay. Rendered with a stained glass material.
Haven’t carved much due to the cold but finally got into my shop this weekend. Made a mallet with kind of a Thor’s hammer design. So calling it Thor’s mallet. Too pretty to bang around so I will probably just display it. Rendering a third version now but had to go with cpu render since I ran out of GPU memory in like 2 seconds. Still have to learn how to optimize rendering but that will be for another day. Learning how to use shadermap to create material textures. The mallet head is laminated Padauk wood with an oak handle. That is the actual color of the wood with oil applied.
P.S. Render finally complete and the background material looks really good. Created from a picture I took from a semi-cab that is rusting off the highway near my home. Also gave me a chance to fix the wood texture of the handle. Slowly, ever so slowly, and I learning the software.
Inspired by FreeFly’s beautiful sword so wanted to do something similar. 30 minute modeling. Many, many hours trying materials and textures. I wish I was progressing faster at using this aspect of Blender. I still have to tackle really learning UV unwrapping. Good UV workflow and just basic UV unwrapping layout with the different tools is still beyond me.
Looking good OLG! I’m liking Thor’s Mallet, love the fact that you CNC’d it out Also digging that texture you created, looks pretty good IMHO. Maybe it could use some bump mapping?
I feel you on the UV portion, I’m terrible at it as well… Are you doing any retopo on your models to make it easier for UV mapping? I do have what I would consider a workaround with high poly meshes that might help? Speaking of that what are you running for a GPU?
Oh, heck, I should mention that I discovered something about my AO Bas-Relief nodes that might help you out with your detail issues. Place a plane behind all the models you are wanting to create a relief of, seems to equalize the depth a little bit better.
DevilsDJ, thanks. I haven’t started retop’ing yet. Typically more geometry is good for cnc patterns. So I’ve been focused on maturing my modeling skills and trying to get faster using the shortcuts.
I will definitely try the plane background and see what it does to my deep models.
For GPU I have an old GTX 950 with 2G I purchased a few years ago. It is way entry level and slow but so far its held up pretty good depending on my settings. The sword peaked at about 1G so no issues with it at 3000 samples. My rust material on the other hand with the 4K maps makes the card start crying.
Thanks again for sharing all your hard work on your depth map technique.
Also digging that texture you created, looks pretty good IMHO. Maybe it could use some bump mapping?
