"Painting" Chrome 2d
polycounter lvl 18
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.
Replies
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...
then if the chromed area is neighboring some other area of some particular colour, have the pretend chrome reflect that aswell for extra effect.
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.
How do say, comic book painters do it to give a better idea of what I'm trying to accomplish.
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. =/
http://itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm
http://skindom.planetquake.gamespy.com/FEATURES/shading/index.shtml
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.
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...
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:
When I attempt to mimic the black shadow streaks and white highlight, it just looks like blobs on my surface.
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.
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
Yea.. Ok, thanks all!
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 .
You could always use radial gradients but if you want speed and tweakableness, lighting effects are the easiest.