Dinner for two.... Part 3

Hello again everyone, still using the old laptop -_- hopefully there is some news next week about the new laptop hopefully its fixed and ready to roll, on a side note busy week trying to get work done, rounding off the epq and getting ready for a university interview and trying to do it all on this old thing ;)



Anyway where did we leave it last time....

Time to go more into detail about the plates, these were really fun for me as I decided to sit down and make my own cycles material for them, these plates were an interesting creation, they are quite simply made from a circle which was extruded up along the Z axis and scaled out and then back in, the material however for the plates was one of the funniest I have made I really studied ceramics and porcelain plates to try and get the look I was going for.

See above the reference images I used when designing the ceramic material, in the end the material wasn’t that hard to create and it looked very effective.

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See below my ceramic cycle’s shader, the model it is displayed on is the Blender official cycle material test model which can be downloaded and used for free on the blender foundation website. The idea behind the model is when you create your own cycles materials they can be applied to this model and be shown off in the “perfect” cycles setting.

 

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The material is created from two shaders mixed together, the first one is a diffuse shader which gives the ceramic its white colour and the second shader is a Glossy one which gives the ceramic its glossy like look, however the glossy shader has a slight roughness applied to the model so the ceramics glossy look is not perfect and unrealistic the mix shader also has its fraction setting changed slightly so both the shaders do not overpower each other and blend to much after testing I found that a setting of 0.150 mixes the shaders just enough as to not over power each other and ruin the effect. I have also used this shader on a lot of models on my portfilo site...

http://pixeldreamsandvertexlove.blogspot.co.uk/

The next key part of my scene is the flooring, which is a normal plane scaled and I applied a wood texture to this plane, of course when I first applied it the texture looked quite fake as it was flat and unrealistic of course a good way to fix this would be to create a bump map however with my current skill set I didn’t know how to create bump maps and thus had to think of a work around which gave the same effect but without bump mapping which was very hard to do.

After lots of searching around on forums and different tutorials I found out about the math nodes, these nodes can change the look of a material in different and quite interesting ways, I eventually found out about a math node called “Power” this node causes the texture or the material to become bumpy, the level of bumpiness depends on how high the power setting and what it is it applied to, in my case I was using a wood floor type texture so the power node made the grooves in the wood stand out and become more 3D which made the scene ten times more realistic.

 Node setup for the ground plane.

And finally...

  The centrepiece of my table contains a small nicely formed candle holder with one candle, the holder itself was formed from a plane which was modelled around a reference image of a candle holder, and the outline was then modified using the spin tool to create the final holder.

The actual material applied to the holder is meant to be a mix between a glossy brass colour slightly worn out. 

And there we have it, dinner for two anyone?

 Till next time.