I have usually very little time to play around with blender due to my studies but I like to do so when I have some free time, so here’s what I came up with a few days ago, everything was done with blender 2.62 and rendered in cycles. Took around 1 hour and a half to complete the whole modeling + setup and 5 minutes approximately to render. The render has a resolution of 1920x1080px and the render was set to 1500 samples. It’s a very basic concept but I like how it turned out and hope you do so
I created a dog tag awhile back for a documentary I was working on but it didn’t look nearly this good (granted this was before cycles).
How did you model the chain, did you use a curve or something? What about the engraving on the dogtag? I’ve had trouble figuring out how to get cycles to recognize transparent images.
Thanks for the kind words
The chain was modelled indeed using a path with a circle as a taper object. Then using a small sphere with a hole for the links with an array and a curve modifier, and then manually retouching the areas where the links weren’t exactly as I wanted them to be.
The dogtag has two textures one for the scratches effect, I didn’t use it as a normal map but as a specular map, using it as a mask in the node editor to mix two glossy materials with different roughness values. The actual symbol engraving was done using a simple black and white image and uv-mapping it and using it as the displacement for the material node.
Here’s the material node for the dogtag so you can see it better
