[Half Life]

In my spare time I am playing with some of these models: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ ... &scoring=m

Solaris_inprocess1.jpg

At this point I've edited the geometry and cleaned it up for rendering -- but I still have to revise the materials and find a suitable lighting setup.

Best,
Jason.

[David Solito]

Hi Jason,
Nice. I find the backgroud perhaps too complex to see the shape of the ship.

[Half Life]

Yeah I agree, I just put in something random since this test was all about making sure all of those hundreds of emitters were working... I'll make sure to show off the model better once I have some control over the texturing.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I've been running a few more tests -- I think I'm ready to start creating some new (much larger) textures for this along with some normal maps for the greebles.

test2.jpg

test3.jpg

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Here's a clay render testing the greebling potential of this Substance as an MXM.

greebletest.jpg

I think this can work as a starting point but I'll need to get in there an edit how the texture is generated for something a bit closer to what I have in mind.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

After running a few more greebling texture tests I think I have a good combination of diffuse/specular/normal map -- from here I just need to output all of the various colors for the paint-job and apply them as MXM's.

greeble4.jpg

Best,
Jason.

[Fernando Tella]

Nice textures!

[Half Life]

Thank-you -- I used the Substance linked above as the starting point, and edited it in Substance Designer to better fit my needs for Maxwell. Here's the new version with all the textures in the appropriate colors...

solaris_newtextures.jpg

At this point I still have some geometry editing and texture tweaking to do, but pretty soon I'll take this out of SketchUp and into Maxwell Studio so I can use HDR Light Studio to create better lighting and some final renders.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I'm still working on editing geometry and UV scaling/mapping issues (have I mentioned how much I loathe doing this in SketchUp?) -- I also may make the MXM materials a bit less specular based on results from this angle.

solaris_geoedits.jpg

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I dropped the Nd of the materials to the Nd of Aluminum Oxide and that seems to cut a bit of the overly reflective quality I found too distracting -- I'm always amazed how I end up with renders that look like Illustrations... I guess my personal visual aesthetic is more dominant than I like to think.

new_nd.jpg

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Another angle with the new material variations just checking to make sure I like the changes... which I think I do -- so back to editing geometry and mapping.

new_nd2.jpg

Best,
Jason.

[David Solito]

a video soon?

[Half Life]

Actually I used it already -- I just completed a course on Substance Designer and I used this as a example of how Substances can be used for texturing. Probably not as cool as the video game crowd might like but I'm not a terribly bombastic person... most of my stuff tends to have an quiet/introspective quality.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I was feeling like the diffuse component of the textures were pushing the results a bit too far so I'm trying some formulas without a diffuse texture.

nodiffuse2.jpg

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

After tweaking the materials a bit more I left it to render overnight to see how they would work out after a full render -- I think I'm satisfied right now with the materials so I'll return to editing geometry and move the whole thing out of SketchUp and into Maxwell Studio so I can work on lighting with HDR Light Studio and camera angles.

currentmats.jpg

Here are the current materials if anybody wants to take a look: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41250852/Greeble_Colors.zip

Best,
Jason.