Expanded Metal

[buffmasterbran]

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to render expanded metal for the grill of a heater.  The comany I work for has had a big problem and now they are spending thousands of dollars on models because they are afraid of using a 3D model to create images for the packaging.  I would really like to prove them wrong and show them that the image of the heater I render will look exactly the same as the one they take a picture of.  The only thing I ma having trouble with is the grill.  Any suggestions.  Unfortunately because its still not on the market, I can't show what it looks like, but this is an example of a heater with an expanded grill.

http://imagethumbnails.milo.com/011/873/449/trimmed/11873958_21593449_trimmed.jpg

[Ed]

You could model the grill.  See my wire speaker grill here:

http://keyshot.com/forum/index.php/topic,2482.msg10109.html#msg10109

You can also experiment with the KeyShot materials that have opacity maps.  Look under Materials > Metal > Chrome > Chrome Horizontal
for example.  You can make your own opacity map to match your particular grill pattern.

Ed

[buffmasterbran]

I have tried to model the grill and wasn't to successful.  I will try the alpha channel approach and hopefully get something that will work.
Thanks for the info and the post.

[PhilippeV8]

http://blog.keyshot.com/how-to-use-opacity-maps-in-keyshot/

does this help ?

[buffmasterbran]

So I figured it out. It was pretty tricky, for me atleast, but I think it work really well.  Since I have been fortunate enough to get a lot of things of this forum, I figured I would through something back that people might one day need.

The first image is using just the opacity texture only, which made the image really flat and since I need some depth it wasn't working.  I decided to add a bump map which worked really well and that is shown in the second image.  Also I have attached a seemless texture, bump map, and opacity map.

If you see anything that might make it a little better, please let me know.  Hope you enjoy these maps.

[PhilippeV8]

Can't realy tell, but it looks inverted to me ... could just be me ... how does it look if you reverse the bump height from + to - or from - to +

[daza]

Yeah I agree, hard to tell though.

[aschubert]

Thanks for posting the solution, it was exactly what I needed!

[jhiker]

Nice work - it looks good. And thanks for posting the materials.