Overall, it's a nice composition. The gems bother me, though. They look milky (a lot like fluorescent plastic), where the originals were decidedly clear. The glow also escapes from the gems into the surrounding area without sufficiently illuminating the surroundings to account for that level of illumination. It feels a lot like what happens when you take the UV filter off of a camera and film under a black light in addition to regular light. There's a lot of illumination on the scene that doesn't match with the expectations of our normal-illumination experiences.
Rather than a diffuse glow, maybe use a small (no more than 50 or so) swarm of point lights on the interior of each gem? I'm not sure how you'd go about modeling that, though. With a swarm of illuminators and possibly a small amount of scattering on the interior of the gems, you could possibly get an effect that would be interesting.
What's the material setup on the gems? Are you using an emitter node? I've always had tremendous difficulty getting glowing things in Blender to look right. Perhaps you'd be better off with spot lights narrowed down and just shooting a high powered beam of light at each of the gems?
I am using emission on the gems...I actually have a 3d gradient ramp based on object space to make it lighter in the center of the gem and darker on the outside and I really like it, lol. I only had the emission strength at 1, which is the same as the background lighting so I upped the emission to 10 so it will actually light the surfaces around it...Had to scale it down and darken the glow, but I do like it a bit more...It's much more extreme now, but I think it's more atmospheric. Also I modeled a dip pen and killed off the feather.
As for the illumination, you can even see some light escaping from underneath the base from the bottom of the center gemstone illuminating the table. I also softened up the shadows a tiny bit...may try for more.
1920x1080_GuildRose.jpg
Last edited by Robbie; 01-24-2018 at 02:05 PM.
I like it. It's a major improvement.
But as other have said before, I'm not a big fan of the gems.
I would prefer either a dim glow, or the natural reflexion of the light.
The gems could be aquamarines.
My Deviantart: https://vincent--l.deviantart.com/
That's a cool idea. I wish I could think of things like when doing these sorts of things. Still the problem is that being emmisive also makes it look cloudy, you literally get the same sort of effects with subsurface scattering. The problem me and I believe the others are running into is they don't look like gems, even bad ones, gems tend to be rated on their clarity and how shiny they are. Even poor gems that are described as cloudy are cloudy with intriguing or organic detail.Originally Posted by Robbie
I like the new pen, it looks spot on just about. The divider IS spot on. I'm definitely a fan of that ink pot, you might consider putting some ink stains near the lip, but honestly that may also ruin the effect. The carving on the table or scratches have interference from the texture on top of them, you can actually make a texture mask that block the texture from going over the scratches (or at least I remember seeing something like that once). The one thing that actually doesn't read well material wise is the red part of the compass, to me it looks like anodized aluminum, but the splotches kind of don't make sense to me.
Edit: Saw your post over on the Blender forums, I hope they give you some feed back. Unfortunately the forum over there has no where near the same vitality that your forum does over here
Last edited by Falconius; 01-24-2018 at 04:25 PM.
I'm kinda torn about the gems...The gems are supposed to be magical and filled with energy...there's no other way to convey that and still have them emit light. In previous iterations back when I had it rendering in MAX I was unable to get the gems to appear "filled" with energy...I didn't really even like the clearer look...the clear gems look empty to me and I want them to be filled with energy you know? If anyone can think of a way to pull that off that would be great, but I'm leaning towards leaving it...I'll still tweak some more...but this thing takes a good 45 minutes to render as is.
Falconius, what are you talking about when you say divider?
Also, the red material, silver material, and brass material all have the exact same roughness mapping, I only changed the base color for them., so that may be confusing for the red metal...
I intend to have ink stains on the cork and the tip of the pen...I'll see if I can figure out a good way to get ink stains on the inkwell. I intend to emboss a "logo" of sorts onto the pen nib, but not sure if it will be visible in the render if I do.
The Blender forums have given me no love since my initial post...I get better feedback from here and IRC honestly.
The Blender forums are dead? Have you tried here? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions
There are a lot of unanswered questions but users can also answers using the comments even if the practice is not recommended.
45 min to render?
My Deviantart: https://vincent--l.deviantart.com/
The Divider:
GuildRose_Divider.jpg
As for the gem problem... Maybe if you doubled the object and deleted some faces and made those emmisive? Or made some sort of emmisive object inside them? I don't know. I think the emission shader uses a diffuse surface assumption and that is the problem (it may be necessary in order to emit light though *shrug* that stuff is beyond my ken). There is no mapping input for the node but maybe there is a node set up you can put in between? I think looking at peoples water shading node ideas may give you ideas ( https://youtu.be/XsRdns2G-z0?t=15m48s ). Alternatively have you tried putting lamps inside the gems? Does that sort of thing even work?
Yeah I'm really no good at figuring out shader problems, which is why this light emission thing is always a problem for me.
They aren't dead, just very unresponsive. Lots of new artwork or WIP threads are started for instance, but a lot of them end up only being one or two posts long. Direct technical questions are answered in the "support" section of the forums, but as often as not in a sort of brusque manner.
That said they are better than the Pixologic forums which have lots of new threads, but practically no responses. (besides the fact that everything going up there looks somewhat professional which discourages others).
Great inspiration! It I love that compass.
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