Materials and Rendering

# 1 10-06-2007 , 11:04 AM

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Join Date: Aug 2006

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Posts: 891

I've modelled a pretty decent mobile phone for my vis-com SAC and need it rendered but after three hours of tweaking I'm still running into problems with recreating my intended shades in Maya:

1. The body of the mobile phone is black and made of metal so I used a Blinn shader and set the RBG to 0,0,0 to make it all nice and dark, intending to rely on the specular to lighten it enough to make it visible. The problem is that it won't lighten up enough, meaning that I had to increase the intensity of the lights. This leads to my second problem.

2. I have little idea how to make a glass like material, so I used phong, set the colour to solid black and maxed out the transparency. The problem is that when it renders with high intensity lights, the material doesn't look much like glass, the whole mesh just turns out to be completely white. Also, I've noticed that once I get the transparency to show (so I can see the LCD screen underneath) the objects under the glass don't look sharper like they would in real life.

3. Setting up an ambient light, along with a directional light and two spotlights in the scene to illuminate the phone, the setup looks terrible, whole sections are either too bright, wrongly tinted or just not illuminated the right way (its hard to describe, it just looks bad). Can anyone please suggest the correct lighting setup? I'm aiming for the same kinda look in those PR photos.

So can anyone please suggest ways I can correct this? Thanks.

C. P. U. Its not a big processor... Its a series of pipes!

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# 2 10-06-2007 , 11:26 AM

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Join Date: May 2005

Location: Manchester Uk

Posts: 6,300

Hey Architect,

Heres what I would do.

Set up the lighting first, start off with a simple 3 point lighting set up with a curved nurbs plane in the background that makes up the floor and the wall, have this a white lambert material

Happymat did a great little tutorial on 3 point lighting, if you have a search in the lighting froum the link's in there.

Once your happy with the lighting with some simple materials than I would go onto creating the materials.

One thing to remember is that you can go higher than 1 for most values in maya, for example specualr roll off, spec colour can be cranked up over a value of 1 too.

also never try to make a colour a "pure" colour as nothing is ever totaly black or red etc etc, jsut add a little touch of blue etc and a touch of white on them, only a bit but it will make it look better.

as for setting for a glass material, heres something that I posted a while ago that might get you going in the right direction.

Also have a look into the fresnell effect for creating materials that have that extra added realism.

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