Reply To: My node adventure (WARNING: Gigantic Post)
Sup! Hope it’s okay if I keep this thread up instead of creating a new one.
I updated my project with new images and just wanted to throw a quick update in here.
Basically, I worked on the stone and gold materials. I tried to generate them in a similar way that I did with the crystal but that did not work out quite the way I wanted it to.
It looked okay-ish, but still too cartoony. It lacked detail and incosistent variety in patterns and scratches and whatnot. So this was what I had yesterday on 11th April:
Note the colours and saturation are way off because I played around a bit with Photoshop curves, trying to make it look more interesting, but then it still looked like a cartoon image just more saturated. Whatevs.
Went to work, came back and started those materials from scratch, this time with most of the material being controlled by texture maps.
And voilà! The gold looks much better now, maybe still a bit too reflective but nothing that a little bit of tweaking at the end cannot fix.
I also made some adjustments to the crystal material, included some air pockets with a noise texture that is channeled into the IOR of the refraction BSDF. And this is starting to look a lot better overall.
Now the details of the textures, especially in the gold ornaments, may not be all too apparent in this resolution and sample count, but trust me, it’s going to look sweet. 😀
This is my first personal 3DCG project where I’m actually making progress and improving as I go, so yeah – thanks to CGCookie and the helpful members in here! 🙂
Cheers!
//Oh, quick edit:
Here are my node setups for the gold material. First screen is from the top image and second from the lower image. As you can see in the better-looking-image the material is much simpler built as most of it is controlled in the texture maps.
