-
Glass Trophy
I’ve never really worked with glass materials all that much before (not that I’ve been doing 3D that long either), but I’m trying to make a glass/crystal trophy. I’ve modeled it perfectly how I want it, but I’m not that great at figuring out the glass part of it it seems.
I know this might be a really, really vague question, but does anyone have any real general advice on how to make this trophy look a little better? I’m aware that glass is very dependent on the surrounding environment, so even help in perhaps making it look good in a very simple environment like this one would be awesome, or how to best make an environment suitable for glass things. (I’m not committed to the grey and white surroundings either, I just sort of picked them randomly for now).
If anyone has any advice, thank you very much! I just don’t want it to look so “sloppy” I suppose. At the moment I just have some simple lights around it.
-
5 Replies
-
As you stated, glassy materials look best with lots of reflections. You can either use an image in the material’s “environment” channel, or add a Sky object to your scene, and then use an HDRi image to the Sky’s color channel. Then your glass will reflect whatever is in that image. If you don’t want to see the Sky object in the scene, add a compositing tag to the Sky and un-check “Seen by camera”..
———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1 -
Did you have any luck with it? I was gonna mention a couple other ways to make your scene look a little more interesting, and then I saw this picture today, which is pretty much exactly what I was thinking.. Just using the lights and darkness to add some interest and really showcase the trophy itself…
———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1 -
Personally I like using light as well but instead of black (although black is easyer to set up and edit to and from) using colored lights and a clean background can be very nice.
Surface Caustics can add that extra touch sometimes too.
Also I suggest playing with you material with the COLOR channel disabled and work the color in the transparent tab.
Here is an example of what I mean. Here i a used a default lit scene from grayscalegorilla but its simple enough you could recreate it.
/Randy
-
Thanks guys!
Jeremy – I think I got it looking pretty decent with the all black background and the light actually being a cool element like in that picture. It’s probably a rookie mistake on my part, but I always instantly add a floor and a sky to scenes because I feel I have to, haha. In some cases it’s better not to! I’m learning every day.
Randy – I can see this being cool too, I was playing with the colored lights and the transparency color in the material, and I ALMOST got it looking pretty neat, but not quite. But I can tell its just a matter of tweaking things and moving things around, which I didn’t have a bunch of time to today. So I’m going to play around with that some more in the near future.
Thanks again, you got me moving in the right direction!
-
I was browsing about what to award the kids that train with me in our school. I got some suggestions from other forums. I decided to give them crystal glass awards which really make a feel in the sense of achievement. I am sure that they will keep this for their posterity.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up