"Painting" Chrome 2d

oXYnary

Any suggestions or tutorials to paint chrome areas on something that's not going to be specifically modeled or shaded for chrome? IE. 2D representation of chrome. And no, I don't mean Photoshop's gradient chrome. I'm talking about how to paint the light shadow to mimic the chrome feel without relying on using photos as textures.

BeatKitano

You will need cubemapping, a lot of it.

fade1

painting chrome(which is basically just a heavy reflecting material, almost like a mirror) will always look off when movement starts.
if you just go for a still 2d image just look at the environment of our scene and paint in strong reflections with highlights using he surrounding colors. big contrasts and distortions help to make it convincing...

eld

Have the painting reflect a pretend enviroment, easy way is to do the regular sky up ground down reflection first, and have it be quite strong, since its chrome.

then if the chromed area is neighboring some other area of some particular colour, have the pretend chrome reflect that aswell for extra effect.

System

Yer, I made this light a while back for ts2, as you probably know there's no virtually no objects that have specular in the game, also same with normal maps, still it didn't look too bad.

Is that what your after? If so I baked out the lighting from max using a 6 omni setup pivoted around the chandelier's centre. Took the bake into photoshop, duplicated the layer a few times, added photo filter and lighting effects. Finally the layers were stacked with blending modes.

oXYnary

This is just a texture, not a physical object. No cubemapping or physical object to bake. I guess I should be more specific. Say, the reflections of mirror/chrome reflectors on headlights.. behind the glass (so your painting these on the glass surface old school). They are also concave, so I cant simply have something to reflect. Not only that but the specular on such are so focused, that any reflection background is mostly lost in the white/black from a distance (unless your up really close which is beyond the texture density Im working with).


How do say, comic book painters do it to give a better idea of what I'm trying to accomplish.

Mark Dygert

How do you reflect the world without reflecting it... that's a hard one to do.
Mostly because chrome is readable as chrome because of the reflection/cube map that slides around as the camera angle changes.

Comics are static images its easy to fake chrome with a locked camera and locked object. But what you're asking for is something that has to move and respond when the camera angle changes. I don't think you can do chrome without some kind of special case shader. =/

oXYnary

Think Quake 1 tech. No shaders or reflections. Hence the comics. Its going to look funny at some level, but it should still read as "this is supposed to be mimicking chrome". So thats the whole 2d thing. Maybe should ask on concept art?

Eric Chadwick

Old school painting tuts you'd be wanting then...

http://itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm
http://skindom.planetquake.gamespy.com/FEATURES/shading/index.shtml

oXYnary

Those seem to be general though. I mean, I assume we all know the basics of lighting. With a concave reflective surface like chrome though, where its reflecting itself and its own shadows over and over. Is what I'm after.

The closest above is this
http://itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm#materials

I guess I'm after particulars and examples of that one specific area. Its the self reflection thats throwing me off.

Damn, I shoulda collected more Silver Surfer comics. Saw an amazing cover one recently from an illustrator. I can look and mimic photos of what Im doing, but they dont look right because Im mimicking that photos view versus the view Im attempting for the static texture.. I guess I want to understand the particulars better.

Mark Dygert

Sounds like you'll end up doing a modified photoshop-esk gradient one that more or less matches your environment.

You could render out a cubemap from the chrome objects location, apply it as a reflection and RTT yourself something to start painting on, provided you have an environment to capture...

eld

but its more than just that, chrome is just a stronger version of any other kind of old school texturing shading, when you do an old school diffuse texture you have to keep lighting in mind, with all the shapes of the material, and usually you only do matte materials, with very dull reflections, but still reflections.


chrome is the same, only the reflections are very strong, just imagine the thing you're texturing is reflecting the world, a simple one, with a blue sky, and a brown ground, all depends on what kind of chrome you want to give off, and then have the horizong be in some specific colour.


then just look at how the object you're texturing is shaped, and apply handpainting after that.

chrome is a high specular, high gloss material, thats it.

this is an old texture of mine, but it demonstrates the theory:

Slum

Hmm, I'd say ask Pior. He's sort of the local guru on shiny surface rendering.

oXYnary

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I sent Pior a PM to see if he can give any input. I think just showing you the type of thing I'm attempting would be best.



When I attempt to mimic the black shadow streaks and white highlight, it just looks like blobs on my surface.

okno

That photo was most likely taken in a studio with a specific lighting set up. If you look at photos like this you can see it's just reflecting the environment around it. It might be worth studying the shape and design of headlights; this might help. It's a funny coincidence because I was reading a lot about Fresnel optics just recently and it's really helpful for things like this.

JacqueChoi

B1ll invented a technique years back blue light, with orange bounced light. Pior has it in his concepts.


Blue light, to black teminator, to orange bounced light. Make sure to paint in 100% blacks for your outlines, and 100% white for your specular.

Vailias

part of the trouble you're having is that the overall effect of a studio shot headlight.. or any headlight, is that you're dealing with both refraction and reflection.


The black bits are reflected from the darkened warehouse, the white bits are reflecting from the ridiculously huge white paper/fabric curved background.

You could always photosource it.

Also heres a quick effort using mostly gradients, a little bit of hand painting, and a few pattern and filter tricks

psd file here

oXYnary

Im starting to see it. That helps Vailias, thanks. I don't need the glass layer itself since thats actually the spec on the model, but your angled gradient especially gives a much closer look. Just have to figure out how you got the smooth shift where it starts/ends (start/stop the gradient with same color with differences in middle)? Then I can throw some overlays of wiggly shapes on top to give further effect of an environment reflection.

Yea.. Ok, thanks all!

Vailias

oh damn thats right, I HAD that gradient as a layer style so it was more apparent, then forgot to keep it that way when I started working further.

IN photoshop when you get to doing the gradient, click load on the gradient editor, then select "metals" should be a default gradient library that ships with photoshop.

I used the "silver" preset and the angle gradient type (middle button on the gradient tool options bar). then altered the highlight placement a little with the placement sliders. Theres also a light airbrushing of black over the bottom half of the gradient in a slight arc .

eld

I think you're trying to find a sollution to a problem you're not just understanding yet. Understand how the enviroment is reflected on the surface and you'll know exactly how to paint it staticly.

System

Ok, now I think I get you
You could always use radial gradients but if you want speed and tweakableness, lighting effects are the easiest.

Eric Chadwick

elb, that's beautiful metal, nice job.

achillesian