I thought I would post a few new materials that can now be achieved since the implementation of normal maps in A:M v12.

The first is one I have wanted to do for awhile. “Engine finish” as it’s called, is a brushed metal technique that can be seen on everything from fire trucks to the nose of Lindberg's “Spirit of St. Louis”.
[attachmentid=18631]

To make it I first modeled tight groove, lathed into a disc, then rendered using the “make Normal Map” plug-in from Anders Averö available here
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=123704

I took that image and in photo editor duplicated and layered to create a tiled imaged creating the “scales”
[attachmentid=18632]
I applied the tile as a decal to my box model, set the mode to “normal” and adjusted the image “repeat” settings. The material settings are not anything special, mostly just adjusted the color, specular size and intensity, and most important played with the reflectivity settings. There is a “moiré” pattern that shows up when rendered, but it goes away the more passes you render in muti-pass.

Using that same normal map technique, you can create diffraction grating surfaces as well. This material technique is the same as the one I did here back in A:M version 6.5. In fact that CD model could have one normal map instead of the modeled grooves now.
[attachmentid=18633]

Continued next post......


Next material is a “metal flake”
[attachmentid=18635]

Created the same as the “engine finish”. Only this time it is a bunch of modeled squares, rotated and turned randomly, then duplicated in the image editor. Again the material settings are pretty basic, reflectivity being the most important.
[attachmentid=18634]

Continued next post...

Those are excellent and would make a huge difference to metal. Well done.

Lastly is a “sequin” material.
[attachmentid=18636]
Same as before, I modeled some sequins, randomly rotated and turned, rendered, and then duplicated in an image editor.
[attachmentid=18637]

All of these renders were created in two separate passes. One for the basic material, and a second just for the hot specular lighting. They were then mixed together with A:M composite. The specular reflection is exactly that, a reflection pass that is only reflecting the lights in the room. In order to reflect the lights, I modeled light shapes and set the ambiance to 100%.

Here is a link to download the normal maps I created to do your own experiments.
http://www.babbagepatch.com/cd/cb_normal_maps.zip

Wow! This is seriously inspiring stuff - thanks!

Very nice samples, Charles!

This technique can add that extra bit of realism to many models. Thanks for sharing!

Jim

That was very informative and handy to know, thanks for posting this,

Michael

Very nice, thanks for sharing. I may have just found what I need for my Disk brakes

Pretty neat stuff. I had my own go at the spiral normal map, and this is what I made. These techniques are very good at scattering reflections. Just make sure that your camera is at an oposite angle to the light source so you can get the specular to show better.

[attachmentid=18680]

Here's a small animation of it.

[attachmentid=18682]

I didn't render the entire thing because I wanted to do some testing with normal maps.


Charles, is there any reason why you used the grey background normal map instead of a more common normal map like a blue background one (ones with z-axis turned on)?

I've done quite a bit of normal map testing, and this normals that I believe to be the best normal map for A:M; I could be wrong.

[attachmentid=18681]

This is a render of a sphere with no background which is why the background not blue. The black background would be the same color as the center of the sphere.




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Here's all the combinations.

[attachmentid=18684]

key: (Pisitive X axis, Positive Y axis, Positive Z axis, Using Z axis)

(off, off, off, off) (on, off, off, off) (off, on, off, off) (on, on, off, off)
(off, off, on, off) (on, off, on, off) (off, on, on, off) (on, on, on, off)
(off, off, off, on) (on, off, off, on) (off, on, off, on) (on, on, off, on)
(off, off, on, on) (on, off, on, on) (off, on, on, on) (on, on, on, on)

Note: The first and second rows are exactly the same because the Z axis is not being used.

I'll do a render to see what A:M churns out.



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Here's my results.

[attachmentid=18685]

The light is coming from the top right, so we would expect to see the top and right arrow light, while the left and bottom arrow were dark.

Please be aware that normal maps do not render correctly when using progressive render. See the below preogressive render to see what I mean.

[attachmentid=18686]


So to get correct normal maps make sure that have Positive X axis turned ON, and Positive Y axis turned OFF; using the Z axis doesn't change anything.

No reason. I modeled the grooves and metal flakes as though they were on the surface of a plane. That plane when rendered using the normal map material rendered as grey. In the end it was irrelevant what color the background was because I did not use that part of the render in the final normal map. Bottom line was that the grey is neutral, offers no depth information. Works for what I was trying to do.

Many thanks for this. As always, my ideas exceed my abilities, so doing and publicising this sort of research is a real help to the community. Thanks again.