3D Workshop - Textured Metal Shaders For Industrial Design Comments
This overview should show you how to approach the texturing and modeling as well. Try not to make your object too complex. Also, keep in mind that with a very good texture you might not need to show all geometrical designs. Drawing quad based wireframes of your objects before modeling them will help you to layout the design and might save you a lot of time at the end. Starting over from the beginning is always a hassle - especially when you realize that with a bit more planing you would have already been done. Through the overlaying of the second materials we also receive some nicely glowing specular reflections specifically along edges as seen at the top edge of the cylinder. Experiment with the approaches I showed you. For example, the UV editor is quite cool to play with in case you want to create some funny anisotropic highlight distortions. Let faces overlap or rotate other faces and then welding them rotated again into the main mesh. The results might not be very realistic or useful for representing a real object. However they might be very useful for something experimental or other applications in which you can see this
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working. (Image 15)
2. Hammered metal shader To create a forged bracelet I taper the ends with a rolling press and planish them round. (Definition of planish: to smooth the surface irregularities in a sheet metal part with repeated hammer blows) This produces nicely tapered round cone shaped ends which can be textured. For that I use mainly a ball shaped hammer. Through texturing I convert the round cross section into the shape of an octagon.
along the body will produce a nice and round body while the edges are sharp. I prefer to have a flat planished end which I roll into a loop. Because those ends are planished, there is hardly any texture left. To model this I need to transform the octagon shape into a rectangular shape and move the center points to the sides in order to model the sharper edges. In the following steps I just gently scale down the thickness of the model and build a loop. (Image 17)
This shape has to be recreated through modeling. I start at the center of the bracelet and create an octagon. By extruding and evenly scaling down each new extrusion I can quickly build the main part of the bracelet. (Image 16) Turning on subsurf, setting all faces to smooth, and creasing the edges
Issue 8 - January 2007