Posts Tagged ‘material’

I’ve been playing with the trial version of Moments of Inspiration (MoI) a handy 3d modelling package which has a striking resemblance to Rhino. Thats unsurprising since it was created by the original develoer of Rhino. Fortunately MoI is about 1/10th the price of Rhino.

The image above is a render of the second model I’ve made using MoI – a fairly simple bedside lamp I created in about fifteen minutes. I exported the triangulated mesh from MoI as a Wavefront Obj file and imported it into Vue 6 Infinite where I’ve textured it and then rendered it. The textures on the lamp are not designed for fast rendering. The shade is a translucent material with a slight displacement applied but this gave the look I was trying to achieve. I also used several point lights inside the bulb to create a light source which creates a more realistic light for a close up render than a single point source does. I’ve uploaded the model to my web site so if you’d like to download it you can get it from the download link at the bottom of this post. I’ve tested it in Vue 6 Infinite on a PC hopefully it should work in other versions. You may want to turn off displacement mapping in the material and reduce the number of lights.

Download: Bedside Lamp for Vue (357KB Zip Archive)

This week’s Vue Lighting Rig is less of a rig and more of a way of achieving a Christmas light effect. Looking at the Christmas lights in Liverpool I noticed several invisible Christmas trees. I’m sure these are popping up all over the country. You see lights in the shape of a tree but no tree. I’ve made four EcoSystem materials that create a similar effect when applied to a cone. One each in red, green and blue with a three colour one too. I’ve tested them with Vue 6 Infinite.

Download the zipped Christmas Tree EcoSystem for Vue (92KB Zip File).

I’m completely wiped out so an early night tonight. If I wasn’t I’d be playing with Vue using three new cool things that have become available this week:

• Incredibly Lush Wheat Fields
• TerraPakâ„¢ toolkit for Vue 6
• New Replacement Wood Materials for Vue SolidGrowth Trees

All of which I’ve coverd on the unofficial Vue News blog but I thought were worth a mention here too.

[I've posted an updated version of this tutorial to my site as: Cloud Layer Sculpting in Vue ]

I’ve been playing with reversing the idea I used for punching holes in a spectral cloud layer in Vue 6 to create God Rays. Instead of making holes I’ve been cutting out clouds in shapes of my own design from cloud layers. Here are two ways you can do this yourself.

Method 1 for any version of Vue (requires a modelling package)

Create a mesh of a cuboid solid with the shape of the cloud you want to create in your modelling package of choice.

Open Vue and load the sample scene I’ve created. This scene saves a lot of work fiddling round with the atmosphere and cloud settings.

Import your mesh and place it so that it cuts through the cloud layer in the scene and so that the hole in the mesh will be inside the render area. You can use the Guide Cube in my scene as a guide to where to put your mesh.

In Vue Infinite and xStream select your mesh and use hide from render to conceal it. In other versions of Vue use the transparent material on the Guide Cube to hide it.

Delete the Guide Cube and the Terrain Object.

Now render the scene.

Method 2 for Vue 6 Infinite and xStream

First prepare the image you want to appear as a cloud. Produce a black and white image in the shape of the cloud and save it as a jpeg or other format that Vue can import. You may need to mirror the image so it will face in the correct direction once imported.

Open Vue and load the sample scene I’ve created. This scene saves a lot of work fiddling round with the atmosphere and cloud settings.

Now select the Terrain and open it in the terrain editor. Select the picture option and load up the picture you made. If the shape is black on a white background you’ll need to invert the terrain. Use the Clip Min setting for the terrain to remove the lower lying altitudes to leave just your shape.

Close the terrain editor and check that the Terrain object is taller than the Guide Cube. Make sure the Terrain object has the same material applied to it as the Guide Cube. This material is 100% transparent so it won’t show up in the scene. Create a Boolean difference of the Guide Cube and the terrain with the Terrain object as the second object selected for the difference so it is cut out of the Guide Cube.

Make sure the Boolean object overlaps the cloud layer and that the hole in it falls inside the camera’s view. Bake the Boolean object to Polygons.

Now render the scene.

Resources

• Example Train Cloud Scene (335KB Vue Scene)
• Base Scene for creating your own (78KB Vue Scene)
• The train image I used for the second method:

The picture I used for my Wordless Wednesday this week was made for the latest issue of Ragnarok. Various 3d models were assembled in Vue 6 Infinite but this one could have been made in any version of Vue. I’ll start with the easy bits. The bench itself is a cube with the old wood material from Cornucopia 3D. The car is the Steam Carriage model from Daz3d loaded through Poser 7. As with using Vue 7 Infinite Poser 7 was overkill for this poser artist or even Daz Studio with a bit more work should be able to save the model for use in Vue. The pencil was a free model from turbo squid added quite late on when a mug I’d made myself took up too much space in the picture.

I created the sheets of paper, the nuts and the cog I made myself. The nuts were the simplest to model. I extruded a hexagon with a circle cut from the middle. I imported one into Vue, textured it with Vue’s brushed steel material. I duplicated the nuts and then used Vue 6′s new smart drop to drop them one at a time to create the pile till I was happy with how it looked.

The cog was produced in a similar way by first using Cinema 4D’s cog tool and a circle then extruding these to make the basic cog. Two cuboids across the cog and combined with it using a boolean addition to make them into one shape. I finished the cog by adding a bit of detail to where a spindle would go through. The cog was then imported into Vue and textured and positioned in the scene.

The sheets of paper began life in Hexagon 2 as simple rectangular polygons. Three of the sheets were made by saving the polygon out as it came and then working on them. The one with the corner twisted I created by first subdividing the sheet into a grid of smaller polygons and then by carefully moving the corner and other points to create the curve. This was saved as an obj file. Both the flat and curved version were loaded into UV mapper classic and I created a UV map and resaved the model. The pages were then textured using images I created in paint shop pro based on research using Google’s patent search. These models were then brought into Vue and I fiddled around with how they were laid out.

Once I was happy with the structure of the scene I tried a variety of camera positions and focal lengths to get the best result. I settled on a camera with the equivalent of a 90mm lens in the real world. Next I tweaked the lighting – there is one light providing the majority of the light but I added a four fill light that don’t cast shadows just to lighten up the darker parts of the picture. Since the sky isn’t visible I removed all the clouds to speed up the final render.

Finally I did a series of small renders with varying settings to find out how I could render a suitable picture for print in a reasonable time. Then I set the picture to the dimensions for the final image and set my computer rendering and went to watch a DVD. About an hour later the finished picture was ready. If I’d been rendering a smaller version for the web it would have been finished a lot quicker.

1. Roget’s Thesaurus: I’ve yet to find a better thesaurus than the one that has evolved through Longman to Penguin.
2. The Story of Western Architecture: More about the history of the development of architecture and the social and economic setting for that development than a manual of style (although it does cover that too)
3. A History of England (Sir Keith Feiling): Not the best or most up to date history of England but it’s a book I’ve had a long time and I know where to find what I’m looking for in it.
4. The Wordsworth Dictionary of the Underworld (Eric Partridge): Good for ideas for characters’ criminal schemes and associated language.
5. The Book of Comparisons (The Diagram Group): I was taught to make sure my answers and data made sense in science at school by comparing them to other things I knew. This is the best book I know for helping with that and it avoids putting in details that are just silly too.
6. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: An essential reference to classic works, authors and publishers but also a mine of concepts.
7. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: Does for Science Fiction what The Encyclopedia of Fantasy does for fantasy.
8. Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics: A great read with some really odd and nasty characters in it’s pages. Pretty much all of them real. Some of them still alive. A great source of ideas for characters.
9. The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land: Where The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is a serious work this is a comic guide to fantasy cliches. Very useful for avoiding the danger of slipping into dangerously over done territory.
10. The Encyclopedia of Forensic Science (Brian Lane): There are a fair number of books like this on the market. I bought this one as a present for a friend and then kept it having found a better present. Lots of inspirational material again with many case studies accompanying the entries on a variety of macabre happenings that are ideal for inflicting on characters.
11. The New Metric Handbook: Where The Story of Architecture is a book about the development of architecture this is a useful guide to the layout and structure of buildings.
    Just beating Neufert to a place on this TT because it got me through my final year degree project. Rather pricy but if you want to know what a particular building will have in it and how it is laid out this is the book.
12. Food in England: An essential guide to the evolution of cooking in the UK including recipes and lots of other useful information that is great for adding colour to stories.
13. Gary Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names: Gary Gygax, one of the original creators of Dungeons and Dragons, had put out a lot of books trying to milk his name over the years. This is one of the few that I’ve found to be worth the money (I did get it in a sale). Listings of names by gender, country and time period along with useful notes on how a culture usualy puts them together and some additional sections on special cases like place names and names for Inns and Taverns.
14. Oxford Senior Dictionary: My very battered dictionary that served me through school. Not the best or most complete dictionary I have but a handy quick reference.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1. Thomma Lyn
2. jenny
3. Randa Clay
4. Fence
5. Nicole Austin
6. Nancy Lindquist
7. Michelle M Pillow
8. Crystal Jordan
9. HighlandAmy
10. Susan Helene Gottfried
11. Janet
12. Lori
13. colleen gleason
14. This Eclectic Life
15. Joely
16. Nicholas
17. scooper
18. Dane Bramage
19. karen (miscmum)
20. Lulu
21. Language Boy
22. Nancy
23. Christine d’Abo
24. Nadine

Here is a second stab at making a displacement material for Vue that looks like short grass.

Download: ShortGrass.mat (9KB)

Finished off two pictures in Vue 6 that will hopefully make it into Rag 52. Quite pleased with the first one. It may be the best picture I’ve turned out of Vue. Also played round trying to get a better Vue grass displacement material for large areas and terrains. The one I posted last night is alright but I think it’s a bit too dense.

Also moved the Fairy Tale Noir on by about a thousand words. I’ve got a new character to play with whose been in the shadows and he’s a lot of fun to write.

Made a few little tweaks to my web site too. Added a new links page for Vue Python resources although it needs more links. I’ll add those over the next few days.

[I've added an updated version of this tutorial to my site: Punching Holes in the Sky]

Controlling Godrays in Vue 6

Sunbeams, called Godrays by e-on, are one of the new features in Vue 6. They appear when heavy clouds break up the light coming from the sun light source. The atmosphere must be a spectral atmosphere and sunbeams must have been enabled. Three atmospheres are included with Vue that create godrays but creating your own can be challenging. Even more challenging though is trying to control where they appear. In this tutorial I’ll cover one method for creating them that I’ve discovered, rather than trying to create sunbeams by modifying the cloud parameters I make holes in the cloud.

A Bit of Atmosphere

It’s easiest to start using this technique with a very solid cloud layer. It can be used with a cloud layer with less cover but I find it easier to start with a solid layer and reduce its solidity once the desired effect has been created.

Start by loading the Hole in Heaven atmosphere. Open the Atmosphere Editor and in the Cloud tab increase the Cover setting to over 90% and the Density to 40%. If you render the picture now you should see very little sunlight shining through the clouds.

Now we need to modify the cloud layer so that we can make holes in it. To do this in the atmosphere editor we need to select the Cloud tab. With the Cumulous layer selected right click on the material preview and select Edit Material. Next select the Lighting and Effects tab. Enable Dissolve Near Objects then set Distance to 0 and Accuracy to 75%. To make it easier to see the beams I find changing the cloud’s volumetric colour to black helps.

Select the Sun light object and change its Orientation to Pitch 180, Yaw 0 and Roll 0 this will point it straight at the ground.

Save this atmosphere so you can use it again in future.

Making a Hole

Now you are ready to make your first hole. The easiest object to make a hole with is a cube. Add a new cube to the scene and then modify it so it is 50m wide and deep and 1000m tall. Position it so its bottom is below the bottom of the cloud layer and its top is above it. Right click on it in the object tab and set it to Hide from Render. Render the image and you should get a square beam of light shinning from above.

By copying, pasting and moving the object you can make more holes or, if you overlap the objects, make the hole bigger.

You can use any of Vue’s standard primitive, group of objects, imported objects or metablobs to make the hole. I’ll come back to cover a few other ways of making the hole in a minute but first I want to explain how to aim your rays and how to improve the quality of the final render.

Aiming the Rays

At the moment your ray is pointing straight down. You can change the angle of the sun. However if the sun’s angle is too steep it may not get through the hole in the clouds. When this happens just tilt the objects to a similar angle to the sun and the light will break through again. Make sure that the top and bottom of the hole cutting objects are still outside the cloud otherwise the hole won’t go all the way through.

Messing Around with Your Clouds

Now you’ve got aimed god rays you can change the settings on the cloud layer to make a more interesting sky.

Smooth Rays

You’ve probably noticed that you’re Godrays have a grainy quality to them. You can reduce this by modifying you’re atmosphere. Open the Atmosphere Editor and select the Sky, Fog and Haze tab. Under Global Settings Increase the Quality Boost. I find a Quality Boost of 10 produces good results but does lead to renders being a lot slower.

Writing from the Sky

One pleasing effect that you can achieve very easily is to cut words into the cloud. Make a text object. In the Extrusion tab set the extrusion to 1000m. Rotate the object so it lays flat and move it so it cuts through the cloud layer. Remember to hide it from rendering.

The Biscuit Cutter Method

You can design shapes for holes in vector drawing packages such as Freehand, Illustrator or Expression. Draw the shape you want to cut in your drawing software and save it in a format Vue can open. I’ve found I get the best results with eps files but I suspect it will depend on the graphics software you are using. Now in Vue create a text object. In the Text tab select Import Vector Graphics and load your file. Set its Extrusion to 1000m, rotate it so it lies flat and position it so its top and bottom are above and below the cloud layer. Now render and with a bit of luck you should get a hole the same shape as the drawing .

Acknowledgements

Thanks to JC for his help in refining the quality of the render. The tower is the Campanile Santa Lucia model from Cornucopia 3d.

Just playing with a heavy fog atmosphere in Vue 6 Infinite. The water is a flat plain with a slightly tweaked dark water material added and the bump map turned into a displacement map. The model is the Bridge of Sighs from Cornucopia 3d.