Reply To: BC4-1810 Homework, Jake Korosi
Hey there everyone! Seeing great stuff as always in everyone’s threads.
This week I used my old Chevy truck from the June vehicle modeling class. So this truck – it comes from an era where auto paint was…somewhat simpler than it is now. Car paints of this period were more or less a solid enamel with a glossy topcoat. That means now metallic fleck, no color-depth or iridescent reflection properties. Certainly you can find old old vehicles that have been tricked out in the modern day with these kinds of paints; but I wanted to keep a little authenticity for my own vehicle.
That said, a glossy solid diffuse paint is rather boring. Aside from which, I already made one, for my renders for the vehicle class. So this time I wanted to take that paint and use the tricks Kent taught in the live stream to age up the paint job considerably. My aim was vehicle paint that is taken care of, but nevertheless is old, a little faded and scuffed in places. I took some experimentation but I didn’t run into too much trouble and I got pretty close to what I was aiming for as far as the paint goes.
That said…my nemesis this week was glass. Eevee does not do glass the same way as Cycles did, at all. When I first imported the truck project into 2.8, all of my glass everywhere looked solid and gold-plated. Which is a neat look for a spaceship but not so much for a vehicle.
Door glass was simple enough – a Principled shader with transmission cranked up and alpha blend mode. The real problem I struggled with was my headlights. The headlights I made for this vehicle aren’t just simple rounded domes. I’ve got the light dispersion pattern actually modeled into the back sides of the lenses, because I wanted to simulate the look of old-style headlight lenses closely and I didn’t think a simple texture would do that well for me. In Cycles with a simple glass shader this worked out perfectly – but Eevee would NOT cooperate with this idea. We argued over it for quite a while. Hours and hours, working on those stupid headlight shaders, trying about five different approaches and NONE of them worked well except the last one, I mixed a glass shader and a transparency shader, and I had to turn the IOR on the glass shader up to something absolutely ridiculous. But….it got close, I guess. As of now, Eevee really struggles with glass of any non-uniform thickness, or glass in front of other glass, or reflective surfaces (like chrome or glossy paint) behind glass.
For the renders with the lit headlights, I created a new emission shader material for the insides of the different lamp housings, and then changed the blend mode on the lamp glass from “alpha blend” to “multiply”. I also adjusted the mix factor to heavily favor the glass shader, something like 0.97, which I was hoping would let some of the glass shape through (fat chance, ha), but ended up just giving the lights a nice warmth, which for older-style headlights is right on.
So with all that said,
Homework Submission, Week 2
With lights on:
From the back:
Those darn headlights:
Was a fun week, despite the pain. I was too happy about my computer being fixed to complain.
Ready for next week!