Lighting

Been a while, I know.

I've worked on tweaks here and there.   Started to work on the light system for the Dining Room models. Still need to work on it, of course.

 Moved the lights I'm not sure what I like better...Problem is the table is already so dark, so you can't see on top of it, but I will have candles/fire burning...so hopefully that'll be enough light.

Sunset version.

Sink

First week of school is over...and it went by so quick. It hit me a little hard on how much behind I am with the Dollhouse. I'm hoping that I'll have a few more assets by the end of the week. If only I can make my models a little quicker, but the more that I do the models the better they get. I just want to make them look decent so I don't have to worry about fixing any models later on.

I think it looks alright. I know there's the "hole" of the sink that's missing, but I highly doubt that they will be seen when I do the full rendered scene. Worse case, I can just texture it there. I have to sacrifice certain details somewhere.   Will be working on the simple faucet head soon. I found a nice tutorial on it, so I'll be able to make it.

Candles - I've been working on the models, then I realized that something is messed up with the glass holder. Upon looking much closer, I found some edges were messed up. And frankly, I think 6010 faces is too much for a simple model like this.  So I decided to just redo the whole model. I made the original model over a year ago. Much have changed since then, especially now I know more about subD and how to fine tune the edges. After redoing the model, I got it down to 1333 faces - already smoothed. MUCH better. :-)

Still tweaking a little bit more on the glass. I need to find a glass model specifically for references. There's something a little off about it. So it's always a good idea to go back to your models and see if you can reduce the polycount somehow without losing the details.

Onward to roughly about 12-15 more models for the Dollhouse.

More assets:

Coat Rack. I used CV Curves to create the hooks and the "legs".  I did a Paint Effect on curve, and changed the smoothing and size. I found this to be a little easier and forgiving than creating a circle and extrude. It gives a much more softer look to it. While I was working on it, the quads became triangle tessellated after converting the paint effects to polygons. It's okay, but it gave me so many tris, as well as it looked horrible when I tried to smooth it. So, I began a tedious task to remove the offending edges.  I deleted over 500 or so just for the upper hook (made one, then after removing the edges, I copied/rotated to make the 6 hooks).

This morning I went back to work on the legs, and I wanted to do the same technique as the coat hooks. I pulled up the option menu of Paint Effects to Polygon - and lookie here - it says, "Quad Output" - I checked the box. Voila - no more tris.  Dang, that would have been useful last night!

Another simple asset. Reading lamp for the Reading room. Took me a little while to figure out how to get the soft curves on the base of the lamp. I didn't want to use curves and revolve. Instead, I just added edge loops and placed the edges in the right spot to give the curves needed. Converted it to SubD.  The lampshade will be separate as I want to texture that separately, while the base I will use just a simple dark copper-like shader with patina. Think it'll work? :-)

Glass Crazy

I've been working on this piece for a while. It was a side piece that I did a year or two ago. I learned how to make my own glass shader. When I worked on it again for my portfolio review class, something was off. For some reason, the color turned out to be more gray and I couldn't figure out how to get rid of that grey spot as you can see in the first picture.

I was able to download a glass shader that someone created off CreativeCrash.com.  It's OKAY to take someone else's shader, but it's not okay to say, "I wrote this shader. I created it."  You didn't, don't be stupid.  If you tweaked it a lot, changed the colors, here and there, or started from scratch, then you can say "This one is mine."  However, there was still "something's off" with the downloaded shader. It was a Blinn material (#2), and I changed it to Anisotropic material instead (#3).

As you can see, the glass material was too crystal clear for me.  I used to have something that is similar to this - fake glass with a candle in it. So, from what I remember it's not crystal clear.  The anisotropic material is somewhat similar, but the light reflected isn't that smooth.  This is just a very small part of a larger scene.    Still need to push the shaders a little bit more.  I really like my first picture, but I need to figure out why there's a "gray" spot there. It can't be color because the rest of the shaders are on black, and if I turned it black, it will show up black instead. 

Definitely will smooth the model for final rendering, make the candle more wax-like appearance (this is just a placeholder), and work on candle flames. I probably will change the color of the table, I'm not sure. I will also add baseboards (just noticed it now...looks very weird right now). The whole scene will be a lot darker than this. I probably will darken the scene and see how the glass shader reacts.  They will react differently in different light situations