Need some help with LOTR ring!

[D7X]

well use displacement, and for the glow make a texture map with an orange gradient coming out of teh text, best i can suggest

[Dave Black]

Can you post a pic of what's wrong? It's hard to tell you how to solve a problem when you only say "I tried it but it doesn't work out well".

As for displacement, I don't think that's such a good idea. The inscription is too accurate and not deep enough to warrant using displacement.

Just use a bump map. Make it a mix map so you can still have dust, scratches and tooling marks on the ring. Masks are you're friend.

There are a few techniques you can use to get the text to glow. You can make a blend material and use masks to zone in on the text. Read about glows in your manuals. There is plenty of info on the subject there.

-3DZ

:D

[iNFERNiS]

aha, thx a lot for the info!

This is where i'm at so far

http://users.pandora.be/infernis/thering.jpg


ground texture looks ugly upclose, it's a highres texture, still it looks ugly when zoomed in. Any way to fix that?

Blend material & mix map? I know what it is, but don't know how, heh. Ah well, guess i'll have to fiddle around some more.

[NemesisFIN]

Did u see that my material tutorial?.... and you can add glowing txt... make pic which have black backgroung and writings are yellowish red.. put that map into extra lighting slot in material maps... (if I membered right)....

[iNFERNiS]

yea I used your material tutorial. But I can't make it look like yours, I don't know much about lighting properly.

I'll try out the text thingy, thx.

[Dave Black]

About your ground texture:

Part of the problem is that it's probably a .jpg or some other compressed file type. The artifacts of compression, as well as the size of the pixels it just getting muddled while viewed close up.

You can fix this in a number of ways. First, you can tile the texture more. This will effect the size of the planks in relation to the ring. Perhaps not the best solution if this relationship matters.

The second way, it to fix it in photoshop.

You can also blur the texture map a bit. There's an option for this in the place you put the texture map.

Another problem is that you probably are using the color map for the bump map. Might be a good idea to actually use a grayscale map that has been processed in PS. You know, some changes in contrast and levels.

Other options include procedurals, and of course, more manipulation in PS.

-3DZ

:D

[leigh]

Heya, don't stress about texturing stuff, you have lots of people to help you out here! :D

Okay, let me just put all this in point form:

The ring

- Assign a seperate surface to the inner band. The bump map of the letters should only be appearing on the outer band.

- For a nice luminous effect, take that bump map you showed us, invert it, and stick it in your luminosity channel. This will serve as a simple luminosity map that will make the letters luminous. You can then also add a nice glow to it from that point.

- It looks like you have placed an image into the rings reflection environment. As a result, the ring doesn't seem to be realistically reflecting its actual environment. I may be wrong here though. However, if you have indeed placed a pic of a sunset into its environment, you have to remember that it is a cheat. Metal reflects its environment, not a selection of sky images ;)
If it really was sunset, the table would be receiving some of those golden tones as well, so that is a dead giveway that something is being cheated.
Don't be afraid to actually remove that environment map from the ring, and instead allow it to reflect it's surroundings with raytracing. Just make sure that it still has some manner of diffusion, so that it retains its gold hue.

- I think that overall your ring is looking a little too reflective. Gold isn't as reflective as some metals, so avoid giving it that chromey look. Although, be sure to implement the Fresnel effect of it appearing slightly more reflective on it's incidence angle. You can do that by placing a gradient ramp into your reflection channel, set to incidence angle, and just increase its amout towards 0 degrees.

The table/ground

- The image is too small. I know you said it's hi res, but what size is that? Overall, the image size of the wood may be rather large, but remember that doesn't always cut it. At the moment, since you are zoomed in, you are looking at the wood image at a zoom closer than 100%, which is why it is appearing blurry and pixellated.
You have to make sure that the texture never shows at anything more than 100% zoom - if you zoom into a Photoshop image, you know that the image becomes pixellated. It's the same with 3D - think of how you have placed the image on this table. It is one image of wood, of a fixed size.
Say for example, this wood image is 800x800. Now, that may seem hi-res, as far as textures go, but then it only looks good if you see it at that same size within the frame itself. This is no longer the case once we zoom in ;)
This particular image of wood will only look good at this zoom, if just the piece of the wood image that is showing was bigger than the frame itself - do you know what I mean?
This is something that is not understood by many artists, who then encounter this problem, when deciding what size to make their image maps.

Now, I just wrote a chapter about this very thing for my book. Here goes:

The best way to do this is to roughly work out what the largest size that any portion of the texture will appear on-screen will be. If, for instance, you are texturing a face that is seen full-screen at any point in time, then you want to make sure that your texture maps that are used on the face will look good if they fill the screen. If the camera zooms into the face, and there is a close-up shot of, for example, the characters mouth, you are going to have to ensure that the image maps for the face are so large that they will look good even when only that small portion of them is viewed full-screen.

If this latter shot were to be broadcast on television at a resolution of 720x576 pixels, then you would have to consider that the image maps used on the face are going to have to be large enough to ensure that the textures around the mouth will look fine even though they will fill the entire screen. This means that your texture maps for the entire face are going to have to be pretty big, to be sure that just the section around the mouth does not look jagged or blurry.

Once you have roughly ascertained the largest size that any portion of the image map will appear on the screen, you can work out an appropriate size by then multiplying that size by two, and working out the size of the entire map like that.

Does this make sense to you? Do you understand what I mean? :)

- There is also the issue of jpeg compression, as 3DZealot mentioned. You probably got this pic of the net, which means it's been compressed. Compression does destroy quality. Try and find the most uncompressed images you can.

- Your colour map has lighting information in it. When texturing with photos, you need to elimate shadows and highlights from the photograph, since they will not be accurate when placed into a 3D scene with its own lighting. A useful way of elimating lighting info is by using Photoshops High Pass filter.

- The colours in the wood also look a little washed out.

That's all that I can really think to suggest at this stage :)

Let me know if you have any questions about what I have just rambled on about!

[Null_Object]

I personally hate texturing:D

[iNFERNiS]

OMG! To much info...can't...take....IT! :buttrock:


@Zealot3D

Thx for the tips! They're very helpful. :D

@Leigh

your the greatest, thx a lot. This is giving me hope again :)

You were right about the environment map, hehe. It just looked better to me, it looks awful without. Don't know much about lighting yet to make it look good. I only used Omni's, that's not the way to go I guess. I wanted to put more light on the ring but then my ground was getting to bright :D being noob sucks :D

The ground texture is about 1300 x 1900, Must be the compression like you said, and still to small? Maybe I should ditch it and try marble instead.

Gonna read it thoroughly tomorrow, getting to tired now, been working for waaay to long on this ring today.

Anyways, thx again, got a lot of work to do tomorrow :D


It's a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing...

now where did I hear that before?
Yea I'm a lotr freak, couldn't resist, sorry :D


peace!

[3dsmax5]

Hmm the ring actually has inscriptions on the inside....but not mirrored as it would get when you map from the outside.
I actually separated the glow and the gold material to two meshes, beacuse of "lens effects glow" wouldn't work well with mixmaps and stuff. You can see how I solved it in my " one ring" thread here:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15423

Good luck! :beer:

[iNFERNiS]

omg yours looks GREAT!

teach me! :D

hehe, i'm still working on it, just can't get it right :(

[Joorsje]

I just bumped into this thread, and saw some work that looked like what I did a year ago, when I was using Max for a couple of months. I wanted to show you guys my Ring.

I used a simple bump map and a diffuse color map for the markings. The render was originally supposed to be printed on a a1 or a3 format, so i rendered in 6614 x 4677 pixels... :surprised

After a lot af failed attempts to create a good looking glow on the markings using Max, I used Photoshop.

I hope to read what you guys think about it.

Cheers!

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