My garsh, I'm circling back to this now but Flupper, your Flippers are stunning, Very nicely done. Keep hammering away. We all appreciate your efforts!
Chapter 6: bats, bumpers, screws
Today I will show you what I worked on over the last couple of months. Some of them took me way longer then anticipated, like the bumpers and the flasher domes. First the Williams bats:
I always wanted to make new bats with the correct proportions and the Williams logo. For Whirlwind, I finally found a good reference image for that which I converted into a vector drawing, which I could use as a reference for the new bats:
I imported the vector image in Blender and reshaped an existing Williams bat of mine to the exact contours of the vector image:
With some experimentation I found a good material (a combination of reflection, diffuse color and subsurface scattering), which I baked into a 1024x1024 texture. I simplified the primitive a little and boosted the contrast of the texture in photoshop:
In order to test them I updated the bats in BK2K, I think they look spiffy:
If you want, you can check them out yourself, yesterday I uploaded a new version of BK2K which has these bats and also my new bumpers:
The bumpers are quite complicated in setting up, I spent way too much time trying to get them look right. Here are some issues which I faced:
- primitives cannot color anything which is behind them in VPX. This means that a colored transparent bumpertop looks wrong when in VPX. The only thing which can actually color something is the VPX light object. So I used this to my advantage: my new bumpertops are almost opaque when displayed in VPX. I put a colored VPX light directly/just below the bumpertop, which is really bright. Combined with the almost opaque bumpertop, these cancel each other, and the effect is a colored effect through the bumpertop.
- Bumpertops have layers of transparency effects. I wanted to make them to look nice, not only in one POV but multiple and even VR. Hard to explain what I did, but if you look at the bumpertop texture in VPX, you will see two parts of it. When rendering multiple transparency layers in the bumpertop, these two parts give a good 3d transparency effect (at least I think so...). When looking at the bumpertops they work quite well, unless you view them more or less directly from the side. One drawback is that you cannot rotate them, then they look off.
- The lightbulb also uses two different transparency layers, I wanted to let the glowing wire also have 3d effect.
Last part, the screws. There are several problems with screws in blender and VPX:
- there are many of them, and they have a lot of faces (compared to plastics for instance which are way bigger).
- they catch reflections, so they cannot be too low poly otherwise they look off.
- If you use highpoly screws in blender, it is hard to translate that to VPX (because of the performance). And even Blender does not like a large amount of high-poly screws, this will increase rendertime.
- Blender has problems with shadows for small objects. A raytracer has a hard time "finding" these shadows.
So I fixed that in the following way:first I modelled a relatively low poly screw, which is also exportable to VPX:
For the shadow issues I baked an Ambient Occlusion map for the screw and also for the shadow underneath the screw (the flat face in the screenshot above). Also, I baked the normals from a highpoly version of the screw, to have better reflections.
If you render that, it looks like this:
If you disable the normal and AO maps, and the subdivision, then the base mesh looks really bad; so that shows why I use all these extras:
The same method I used on the other type of screw, which I call the hexanut:
If you want to see my new flasher domes (also made for Whirlwind, but ended up as a demo table), you can find it here:
https://www.vpforums...&showfile=13138
Next update: https://www.vpforums...430#entry469993
Top
Contributor
are all trademarks of VPFORUMS.