Snefer makes steampunk

Snefer

Realised I never made any steampunk, so I figured I would cross that off my list aswell, so I built a quick Microscope, and gonna do another asset after this. Highpoly only, no UVs, took the opportunity to do some more automatic materials in Modo and practising rendering a bit.

Still too lazy to make proper renders though, takes so looong.

WarrenM

People keep asking about it, so here's a tut ...

1. In your material, open the properties panel and set this value to something other than zero:



2. Render.

:P

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

quite fuckin good

only crit i got is that the grungy proc material undermines the rest areas and makes it look very noisy

Snefer

It works perfectly with sub-d meshes, it only smoothes hard normals, either normal lowpoly ones or sub-d edgeweighted ones, aswell as intersections. And yeah, pretty easy to individualise it, i dont have same width or active on all surfaces, lots of ways to control it.

Spoon

WarrenM wrote: »

People keep asking about it, so here's a tut ...

1. In your material, open the properties panel and set this value to something other than zero:



2. Render.

:P

Made my evening

Noren

I'm very impressed with your quick turnaround on those environment concepts and this looks great, too, especially for a first try. But to me the sense of scale and level of detail feels off (some of the screws seem tiny, while other parts don't share that sense of "watchmaker" precision) and it looks a bit cobbled together, to be honest. I think you could do a lot better with just a little more planning. (I suppose you didn't work from a concept or a single reference or I'll have to eat my words.)
Function wise I don't quite get why the two cranks are so close together, so in certain positions they'll get in the way of someone wanting to turn the other one.(Depending a bit on their exact size.)
Or why the microscope has to rotate vertically that precisely in the first place (or at all, for that matter) when shifting it would make much more sense at a first glance. The little railing seems without a real purpose, too. Now I'm probably overthinking this for something that's supposedly mostly eye-candy, but along with the level of detail it reinforces the impression that those parts don't really belong together.
Some of the ornaments look a bit lazy or out of place, too, and I'd even say that leaving them away could strengthen the piece instead of hurting it.

BackSlash

Wow that looks awesome! Going to have to check out these automatic material - didn't know that was possible without UV's

Snefer

Noren: I used mostly victorian microscopes as reference for the detailing, so size of things like screws are actually more on the large side rather than small : ) The cranks both work just fine, might look like they would get in the way of eachother but they actually dont. My reasoning though is that its attatched to a table, hence the large solid base, and you will need to rotate it to maximise lighting conditions. The machinery..things cause vibrations if it wasnt bolted down, so thats why you need the cranks! If we are going to debate exact functionality on steampunk or scifi though its gonna be tough to defend this, since i am not an engineer from the alternate past or from the future

Ornaments are lazy though, that is correct (together with most of the piece) but thats just because i am lazy ^^

Noren

I was talking more about the hand and arm who has to operate the cranks, I imagine there are some uncomfortable positions, but I might be wrong. Not entirely convinced about the other points, either, but you are correct that it would be a bit silly to argue about that.

Clark Coots

looks cool and all, but i'm not sure if this is a telescope or a mounted anti-air raygun.

dzibarik

Snefer wrote: »

It works perfectly with sub-d meshes, it only smoothes hard normals, either normal lowpoly ones or sub-d edgeweighted ones, aswell as intersections. And yeah, pretty easy to individualise it, i dont have same width or active on all surfaces, lots of ways to control it.

Do you control it by weight or node shading?

There is a guy on Modo forums who is doing it but I'm didn't have enough time to go through it yet - https://www.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?f=9&t=93906

Snefer

dzibarik: haha yeah thats Magnus, he also works at Machinegames, he is awesome : ) I just control it per material instance which I ahve a handy interface for. But you can control it with node shading, and could probably tie it to weighting aswell if you wanted to. Have not dug that deep into it myself yet though.

MagnusL3D

dzibarik wrote: »

Do you control it by weight or node shading?

There is a guy on Modo forums who is doing it but I'm didn't have enough time to go through it yet - https://www.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?f=9&t=93906

I am "a guy on Modo forums". Best way to control it is with different materials that look the same but have different rounded edge values.

You could do it with weight maps, but then you could only control it where there actually is edges. And one benefit using the rounded edge shader is that you just dont build edges where you intersect your mesh.

/M

[Deleted User]

MagnusL3D wrote: »

I am "a guy on Modo forums"...

... and Houdini formus too

Cool technique Magnus.