Simple Still Life + questions

Artwork Works in Progress
1

Still Life
Ok, so this is mainly just me trying to learn some things like spin and stuff. I think it looks ok, but here are some questions, which are probably simple.

  1. I can’t get the tea to look like tea. I know it has to do with transparency, but when i raise the trans, z or ray, i get black inside the cups, like this.
  2. As you can see the texture on the teapot is distorted in the upper left. when the camera looks at the teapot straight on, this distortion isn’t there, any explaination?
  3. not really a question, I know that the sand in the zen garden thing is really sharp. So far I’ve only tried procedural textures to make some designs in the sand, but i’ve failed. maybe i should make some textures myself for that.
  4. can anyone suggest a good environment to put this in? is it worth it?
  5. any other suggestions, C + C welcome.
    Thanks.
2

I’m no expert. But here are my suggestions.

  1. Liquids suck. Add some reflection with ray mirror on the tea. That should help a little. I think some other guys have made shaders for stuff like that, which with a little searching you should be able to find.
  2. Not seeing much of a problem or a solution.
  3. Is that wood texture? Just toy around. Lowering the distortion on marble will get lines that you might be looking for. Not sure why it looks the way it does. It should be able to work with procedurals.
  4. It’s worth it. Keep it up. Maybe some kind of oriental setting. I don’t know much about tea culture.
  5. The sand, uh, rake is clearly subsurfed because each segment narrows and tapers off. Select the last vertices on each segment, extrude, don’t move it, and hit enter. That might improve it.
    Do more with the textures on everything.
3

Ok I’ve looked at this and read your message.

First things first.

Your image is way too dark.
I suggest for starters you use one sun lamp
set it to something like 0.700 with raytraced shadows and
add a new world, select the Ambient Occlusion button,
set samples to 8, Energy 1.2, Use Distances - DistF = 1.000

As for the tea there is a PDF I have that shows how to do
water that I think would work well for this.
I’ll try and find the link to it for you.

Sand

1.Model the sand and use a procedural texture.
2 Use a sand color map and bump map.
3.Use a displacement map and procedural texture.
4.Use a sand color map and displacement map.

Environment

Just put all your objects on a plane
for now. And make it big so you don’t see anything else
but the objects.This will give you a surface for shadows
as well as hide the world.

Get that stuff worked out and we’ll go from there.
:slight_smile: