Your model overall looks pretty good, but your forms look really soft. I'd tighten up those bevels before moving onto the baking process, and I'd also exaggerate the cut-ins. as it stands those little diagonal cut-ins will barely show up in your normal bake at all.
woot got it fixed not quite sure how i did it but now its on to texturing and fixing the normals a bit i think its pretty good though for just the straight bake!
trying to keep this reletively clean... now im baffled, this is sooo frustrating!
Im going for the painted glossy look in the picture, it just seems i cant hit it. Im not trying to damage the crud out of this thing, any suggestions please!
its looking real nice, but is this project only about the microscope, or is the microscope part of a larger environment? If its part of a larger environment, I wouldn't do too much more work on it, maybe add button labels, manufacturer logos, whatnot. I don't know if you have this planned: but I would suggest giving the subject lenses a metalic tube, instead of the white plastic ones they have now... IE:
The operational lenses are housed in machined metal tubes, instead of plastic. could help get that 'clean' look down.
It could be just the angle, but it feels like the center of the tray where samples would be placed isnt actually lined up with the main viewfinder lens.
heres an update i think im nearing completion. As always i would love feed back! i feel that the brush metal looks like trash but im not sure if thats because of the resolution of my maps 1024 x 1024 or that im just not grasping the essence of the material.
all maps are shrunk to 50% originally all are 1024 x `1024
The brush metal NEEDS anisotropic specular. If not, use a cubemap, if not remove gloss completely. but looking good!
BTW:
anisotropic specular? and as far as cube map i do have one on there is there any way to make it stick more to one perticular region like the glow map? mmm remove the gloss map on that specific part? so make it all black. sorry still figuring out how these maps all relate to each other, can be frustrating and rewarding all at the same time haha.
If you need some help with the textures and shaders, I can lend some experience. Working with shaders is something a lot of people find complicated.
#1: The cubemap/gloss/specular are all just different shader 'fakes' of the same thing: Direct light refection. Materials that rely on reflection to denote their color (such as shiny metal or water) require a small amount of diffuse and a large amount of specular/reflection.
Try this: remove all of your diffuse (black) for your metal bits and replace them with 100% (white) in you gloss and spec maps.
Replies
Im going for the painted glossy look in the picture, it just seems i cant hit it. Im not trying to damage the crud out of this thing, any suggestions please!
source art
Diffuse
Spec
Gloss
The operational lenses are housed in machined metal tubes, instead of plastic. could help get that 'clean' look down.
all maps are shrunk to 50% originally all are 1024 x `1024
screen grab from 3 point shader
BTW:
anisotropic specular? and as far as cube map i do have one on there is there any way to make it stick more to one perticular region like the glow map? mmm remove the gloss map on that specific part? so make it all black. sorry still figuring out how these maps all relate to each other, can be frustrating and rewarding all at the same time haha.
#1: The cubemap/gloss/specular are all just different shader 'fakes' of the same thing: Direct light refection. Materials that rely on reflection to denote their color (such as shiny metal or water) require a small amount of diffuse and a large amount of specular/reflection.
Try this: remove all of your diffuse (black) for your metal bits and replace them with 100% (white) in you gloss and spec maps.