My Passion Projects Megathread (+ Torus Maze and others )

Started by DMerz III, February 18, 2018, 03:58:14 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

DMerz III

  :) Hey everyone, I've seen some really cool threads from the veterans who have continuously updated a single thread with some of latest renders they're working on. I like to practice by doing some quick projects on nights and weekends. I usually post those to my Instagram and website, but I figured I should also share my faves here with you guys.

I do most of my modeling in Blender3D or MoI3D or a combo of both. The rendering is all done in Keyshot. I don't usually do much post on these quick images, but if I do, it's usually just color/contrast. If the model is from elsewhere, I'll be sure to post a link.

Here's a few to get started. If you want to see more, check my instagram @merzthethird






crankin

Nice. Im sure your work will improve in great bounds by doing this.

DMerz III

Thanks Crankin, it totally has!
Here's another, which is work in progress still.
Tennis Ball, modeled in Blender with hair particles (still need to tweak a bit) 25million triangles in Keyshot 0.o

Actually render time wasn't too bad though, the shaders are pretty basic at the moment, trying to get a feel for how to best represent that fuzz!

Chad Holton

I'm diggin' these. That tennis ball has a nice fuzzy feel to it.  :D

DMerz III

 :) Thanks Chad, definitely liking the initial outputs, still want to tweak. Once I get the procedure done, I think I'll make a video tutorial to share my process.

NM-92

I don't understand. Is the entire green surface of the ball covered by a particle system ?

DMerz III

 ;) almost. Yes and no, there is a hair particle system (20k strands total, which has been converted to mesh, then to curves to add thickness, then converted back to mesh, subdivided once so there is geometry to export as an FBX into Keyshot.) I just worked on this for a few hours last night, my home machine was not happy about it.

Even though there are 20k strands, I think it isn't enough to cover the entire ball, so you do actually see the ball geometry here, but with the use of some texturing and bump mapping, it doesn't look 'smooth'. So it's a bit of a trick, but again, limitations of memory and cpu at that point. Going to keep working on it, the strands need to be a bit more 'fluffy' in my opinion.

NM-92

Quote from: DMerz III on February 19, 2018, 11:30:15 AM
;) almost. Yes and no, there is a hair particle system (20k strands total, which has been converted to mesh, then to curves to add thickness, then converted back to mesh, subdivided once so there is geometry to export as an FBX into Keyshot.) I just worked on this for a few hours last night, my home machine was not happy about it.

Even though there are 20k strands, I think it isn't enough to cover the entire ball, so you do actually see the ball geometry here, but with the use of some texturing and bump mapping, it doesn't look 'smooth'. So it's a bit of a trick, but again, limitations of memory and cpu at that point. Going to keep working on it, the strands need to be a bit more 'fluffy' in my opinion.

Quite tricky ! We need some kind of support for this kind of things in Blender. I tried Cinema 4D once before and you can do a lot of stuff with hair and export it without geo directly into Keyshot. A plugin for Blender users would be really cool.

DMerz III

I agree, would be nice not to have to mess with all the conversion as that is what took so much time (only to discover that you want to change something, so you have to go back and wait again). I would click convert curves to mesh and immediate run away from my computer, as I was afraid to breath on it too hard and crash the system.  ;D

Some of the calculations took 15-20 mins to resolve. Importing the geometry into Keyshot took quite a bit of time too, as I said 25 million triangles!

DMerz III

 :) This is a bit older, but modeled this side table in Moi3D and rendered in Keyshot with the procedural wood, love the ability to recreate wood grain right inside Keyshot.


DMerz III

So I worked all day on updating my tennis ball from earlier this week. (Check earlier in the thread)
Blender had just updated some of their hair particles settings and this was a perfect opportunity to explore that.

I think the earlier round resembled paper mache, and this final version has a lot more 'fluffy fuzz' going for it.
Somehow, I also managed to get the polycount down as well, from 25million tris to 17.6million tris.
What do you guys think, did I improve?  ::)

Also attached is a screenshot from blender showing the hair system.




NM-92

Yep, that's definitely better. Specially on the outline off the ball. You can now see a lot of tiny hairs instead of that weird transparent offset you had before. The material looks really nice also, did you change something there ?

Will Gibbons

Really nice, man! I dig it :)

Probably would save some compute power by only putting fuzz/hair on the front side of the ball. ;)

DMerz III

Quote from: NM-92 on February 25, 2018, 12:22:08 PM
Yep, that's definitely better. Specially on the outline off the ball. You can now see a lot of tiny hairs instead of that weird transparent offset you had before. The material looks really nice also, did you change something there ?

I did change a few things in this update. First; I made a plane in Blender, used my same hair system on that, and baked the normals. I used those normals on the underlaying ball (the base ball beneath the hair). That way, when you do see a ball spot through the particles to the ball beneath, there is still texture that matches up really nicely with the hair above (this helped me cut down on the # of hairs).

The base ball material is a plastic, with a fairly low IOR because I didn't want it to be too shiny, but still wanted the specular channel.
The hair itself is plastic as well, but it has a higher IOR (enough to catch some light and 'sprite' out in a few areas) the specular on that is also a brighter green in order to keep that 'fluorescent' yellow look that the balls have for high visibility. I plan on doing a full video tutorial about this at some point.

Also, thanks Will! Glad you dig it! I hear ya about the front-side only! At least now I can animate the ball and not worry about bald spots? Haha

Esben Oxholm

Nice thread, David!
Really digging the updated ball. Think it looks really good! Keep'em coming!