Jewelry U3DAC April

[Dragneye]

Abt identical, but I think the second one is better only because it seems a bit more in focus and a bit more lit.


... um, abt Blender. If you're going to spend time learning anything abt a new program, make the effort for Blender (only when i approached it as if I knew nothing about 3D software usage was I able to make any headway. Start the process that way).
Great renderers (internal is easy, 'Cycles' you have to learn nodes but quite diverse), sculpting for overall convenience/efficiency i prefer it over zbrush nowadays, VERY stable so far, animating works well and when it don't you can figure out why, so... yeah.

[Finis]

The lighting is now a emissive plane and a model to make a ceiling with light panels plus a spot light on the necklace. More specular reflection on the gems. Iray in Daz has a metalicity/roughness system and a specular/glossy system. Nearly all the shaders available use the metalicity one ironically with "metalicity" set to zero. I switched to the spec/gloss one and that got the bright facets on the gems. Using regular render mode plus caustics (pic1 above) since neither you nor I saw much difference adding MLT (pic2).

Resizing and jpg compression weren't friendly to the hard won caustics.

I watched intro to Blender videos. While acknowledging they are very basic, which is good, that's what I want, it was funny that Blender is soooo difficult that I watched the videos at 1.5X speed.

[Finis]

Making perfume bottles. Watch out Marcel!

The liquid object is a copy of part of the inner reservoir, solidified, normals flipped to point inward, and made slightly larger than the reservoir per a tutorial I saw. In this experiment the two bumpy bottles on the left have liquid that is slightly smaller than the reservoir. I see no difference from the normals flipped or not.

See how most of my bottles the liquid appears to fill the bottle to the outer surface as if the glass had no thickness? Photos of perfume bottles often look like that but some don't. In some photos the shape of the reservoir is visible. I think glass with different refraction is what does that. I'll use the "to the edge" ones since most photos show it.

[Finis]

Experiments with water in glass. Daz-Iray render.

The back row has thick glass. Front row has thin glass. The four on the left have the red water object a little bigger than the inside of the hollow glass sphere while the four on the right have it smaller. The orientation of the normals of the water makes no difference. A test with just water spheres confirmed this. From left to right the tests have normals in, out, in, out. So the size of the water object relative to the inside of the container is the important thing. That makes the liquid color permeate the entire object or makes the glass more visible. With small liquid objects the reflections are bright. Photos of perfume bottles show both effects.

[Finis]

A label for the bottles. I'll wait until I learn Blender to put labels on the other bottles. Blender's cloth or softbody and physics system can place the cord easier than manually fitting it and it would be more realistic. The text says "Perfume of Finis" in Futurama's Alienese 2.

[Finis]

That's it for now. I'll put my CG effort into learning Blender so not many pictures from me for a while.

I got results for the emeralds more like what I want by experimenting in a test scene. I started by applying the standard diamond material to my jewel model with a light emitting panel above and a spotlight. I adjusted camera position until I saw bright facets. Then I changed the IOR and Abbe to settings for emerald. I found that the IOR influences the brightness of the bright facets. Then I experimented with the color. A tutorial said to use the glossy color but I found that the transmitted color worked better but emerald green rgb made them shiny black. The transmitted color had to be much lighter. Emeralds usually aren't clear so I made the base color emerald green and the refraction strength (roughly equals transparency) less than 100%. Iray renderer.

More here.

[Dragneye]

Darn good I'd say. Hard pressed to find flaw in the necklace one, and, that's looks like mighty fine alien brandy.


@ Blender comment.