Total Art Soul - for artists

Thanks Cathy... and thanks for the FP

tallpindo wrote:
None of the 3D art programs including Maya have good refraction that you could use to make a lens that focuses.

Unless I am misunderstanding you.. I would probably disagree somewhat.

Made this in Blender and rendered it with LUX, the monkey is inside the sphere of glass:



And although I didn't subsurf the inner cube I think you will agree the refraction is pretty good on this image as well:

You are beating around the bush. All or nothing on this one. Make a lens. Show that it works like a lens with no faking. Sure you can clone a magnified image into a circular frame and it looks just like a magnifying glass but that's not becaus ethe refraction code in Blender did anything. Then place a light behind the camera and focus it through a lens on something and show a spot of light. Again, no faking. Why no faking if it looks better. It's the one set of hands problem. If I want to make a lens and animate something imaged by it in an objective I would have to fake thousands of images. Hollywood can aford to do that. Burbank can afford to do that. I can't. I only offer tips to improve work. If you want to fight the technical then I leave you to struggle with what you have. I know it is not there. Not even 10% of it. Make a wrap around windshield car of the mid-50's (for distortion)then make a COE car of the 1990's (for nuisance reflections) with the glsass leaned well back so the driver is far from the glass at night with the instruments lit to see what problems have been solved in the real world. Then go to the model world and try to catch up.

Incidently, to make the text on the bottle, I would make it in script by simply adding polyline points until I had the full silhouette of the text. Then I would zoom in on every letter and clean it up then I would connect all the open areas in the text like the center of the O's to the outer boundary by lofting. Then I would make organic to give it a symmetric humped look bot up and down. The I would go in the side or front window and select and delete all the lower hump below the water line. Then I would go back from the modelling room to the main room to use bend and twist in Effects to wrap what I had made around the bottle. It always skews a bit so I would align it carefully exactly normal to the bottle vertical axis step by step, bend, algin, bend align. This is how I would do it in Carrara. In Blender I'm sure similar methods and commands exist. Finally I would send a email to Coca-Cola telling them where to find the result.

There are a couple of things I would suggest. Start with a glass default setting. I don't know blender that well but I am sure you can find a tutorial for a glass material to have as a base. Then play with the settings. I spent alot of time moving the numbers back and forth to see what they did and how to combine the texture/lighting to get the type of glass I wanted. Put a real glass in front of you while you work and don't stop until you want to take a drink out of your bottle I think the best way to learn how to texture procedurals is to be able to recognize the details of the texture you want and then figure out the technical way to reproduce it. Like what makes this glass. How is the light bouncing around. How do different thickness of glass look.

I hope I make sense

Ooh--I love Blender but I've sort of "sworn off" it for awhile--I was getting kind of frustrated--I can make 3d meshes pretty well, but texturizing them is another story---so anyone who can do as well as you guys have, has my utmost respect! My "glass bowl" meshes I made awhile back are pretty pitiful compared to those gorgeous glass cubes and bottles, and sweet Suzanne in marbles! I had started off playing with blender to make objects to put in the Sims2 games--and while I can make meshes in Blender, UV map 'em, and put textures on--I never figured out how to get them into the game "un-wonky-ly"