Is far as things like lightsabers, I’m not concerned with minute details. . . they do look kind of flat on the top though. However, I’m only using this cg set for one shot - a 360º sweep around the two guys. (The rest of the scene is animated in real life.) So I’m not too concerned if the shot doesn’t turn out absolutely perfect.
Yeah, the floor doesn’t look completely realistic, but again, I’m not worrying about the minute details. Hey, I’m glad just to get the floor imported into Blender right now!! :o Plus, I would have to have a lot more computer power to add in all those things like SSS. I’ve experimented a little with that, and it takes a ton of time to render just the default cube with default SSS. . .
I don’t know a lot about nodes. What I did with Blender is I jumped into it, learning only the things I thought I would need to use to make super-simple Lego animations. Sometime, I want to start from the beginning and cover Blender more thoroughly though.
Check the latest blenderartists magazine - Issue 12 - for some plastic shader goodness. It may have some techniques to help.
I think however that beveling the top of the nubs would help enough to solve your issue. Also, it looks like we can see a seam between all the little nubs. Do you need to remove doubles?
bevel every single sharp edge the slightest bit and turn on mirror reflectivity on the plastic. blur the reflections. render times will go out the roof but the plastic will look much nicer.
Back in the dawn of history (about 1984), Pixar was experimenting with 3D rendered images. They were annoyed that everything looked like it was made of plastic.
Turned out that the problem was they made the specularity highlights white. Plastic is basically a white material with bits of color suspended in it.
When they made the specularity color a lighter shade of the object color, the plastic look vanished.
I am interested in bevelling all of the parts, and the studs (as they’re called). The only problem is, the only way I know how to do this is to select one piece at a time and bevel them one by one. This is ridiculously impractical for large models though. . . is there an easier way?
There are some little gaps between the baseplates, but that’s because of the ldraw parts. In real life, I used a 50x50 baseplate, but in Ldraw I used a bunch of smaller ones. Since the corners were a bit rounded, there’s a little gap between the corners of the baseplates in Blender.
I am already using ray mirror on the plastic parts, by the way. I have it set at .1, which may not be enough however.
You can use array modifiers to create a field of instanced studs!
To create the array modifiers- in top view (num 7), Place the 3d cursor (select the object, type shift-s, then select “cursor -> selection”) to the center of the stud.
Add an empty and name it something appropriate like field_X. Then apply an array modifier to the stud. Unclick “relative offset” in the modifier, click “object offset” and in the OB field type the name of the empty you created.
Now when you move the empty it will create instanced studs. The number created is set by the number in “fixed count” and the spacing is set by the distance between the empty and the original stud. Create your x row by setting the fixed count and moving the empty in your x direction.
Now (in top view still) add another empty and call it field_y. Add another array modifier to the original stud, with field_y as the object. Now move the field_y empty in a direction perpindicular to the direction you moved the field_x empty and ta-da!- a field of instanced studs.
You can now tab into edit mode and adjust the verts of the original stud, say bevel the top (but don’t use the bevel tool- select a vert on the top edge and hit ctrl-r. Now move your mouse till the new purple line is going around the cylinder of the stud and hit return. The stud is now cut- you can move the ring of verts (hold down the alt key and select one vert in the ring and whole ring will be selected) up or down and scale it just how you want it to bevel the edge), and watch all the others change too!
You could have bevelled first, the order doesn’t matter but you see now how you can create all those studs which are really copies of a single stud.
If your stud needs to be repositioned, be sure to select it AND both empties at the same time to move it or the array will change when the location of the empties relative to the stud changes. The best thing would probably be to parent the empties to the stud- select both empties and select the stud last then type ctrl-p and click “make parent” now when you move the stud the empties move with it.
Hopefully this was not too confusing and will be useful.
Wow, that’s some powerful stuff. I don’t completely understand it all, but I’ll look into it and hopefully with practice I’ll master that kind of thing!