[tanguy]

Just want to say incredible crazy scene man... Where do you find this kind of idea ?
wow.
Great modelling and great setting man.

[jurX]

...nice!!

[ludenhud]

Stunning! Really good modeling work and what a render! 5 stars

[Jozvex]

It looks like you have 2 equally strong lightsources in the scene. One in the top right angle and one to the left..
I would go for a more strong warm sidelight and a weak blue-cyan fill from the oposite....and also some nice sss in the material.

Nice model and comp.

Thanks for the suggestions! I see what you mean, though it's strange because the lighting is from the Maxwell sun, and there's only 1 sun hehe. Definitely I'll try an SSS one now.

Just want to say incredible crazy scene man... Where do you find this kind of idea ?

Thanks! For the idea, I decided that I wanted to make a 'macro' style photo (though in the end, it's only semi-macro I think) with shallow depth of field etc. For that I needed something small to 'photograph'. How I thought of pegs specifically...I'm not sure, it just popped into my head that pegs are small and not too hard to model.

So, I made a really basic peg (no bumps or inset areas) and it looked ok, but then I read that one of the special things about macro photography is that you can see close-up details, that normally you wouldn't notice. Well, I realised "of course, that's obvious!" and so I started adding insets and bumps/grooves for details etc.

The most obvious place for pegs (at least in my house) is outside on the clothesline, and it was a lovely sunny day here, so I tried to recreate that feeling in Maxwell!



EDIT:

Here are some details about the scene:

Focal Length 180 (I read it was a common 'macro' focal length)
Shutterspeed 1200
fStop 2.4 (for bright sun and shallow DoF)
ISO 200 (the colour adjusted image was ISO 150)
Gamma 2.2
Burn is 0.8 for the first two images, but only 0.4 for the good 3rd one. If I set it any lower than 0.4 it starts to look a bit clamped and flat.

The material for the metal 'coils' is a 40/60 mix between the Silver complex IOR and a middle grey lambert material to make the metal not look so hard and shiny. I actually do that quite often, I mix a complex IOR with a black lambert to darken it, or a plain colour to tint it etc.

The peg materials are just brightly coloured with 80 roughness, with a coating over them. I used a coating instead of a mix because it seemed to look more realistic in this case. Using a mixed shader with say 30% reflectivity made the whole peg reflective rather than just the most glancing sides, which is what I wanted.

[ludenhud]

What modeling technique did you use modeling this highly detailed pegs?

poly to subd? Just soo good

[Jozvex]

Subds are too complicated for me! Haha, I've never modelled anything proper with them. I know why they're great and why I should learn them properly but, I just never have! I really like NURBS in Maya, at least for starting the model, so I drew some outline curves and started building some surfaces from them, but it started getting too complicated. So in the end I used what I'd made from the NURBS as a rough template to just box model it from regular old polygons. I start getting into trouble though because I don't pay much attention to the flow of the topology, then when I want to add bevelling or other details I have to reconstruct parts of the mesh manually, hehe.

The two halves of each peg are separate and so at least I only had to model one side. The coiled metal parts were easy because (finally!) Maya has a helix primitive that I extruded the ends of.

Another project I'm working on (for a company) is pretty much all NURBS and it's about as technical as this. I'll definitely post it here when it's done!