Lit Ammo Room

This week we tackled the subject of basic lighting. This was pretty straight forward except that I could never get any of the mental ray trace renders to show anything but black screens. Otherwise, I think I came up with some good ones here.

Ammo Room Materials Assignment

Well, this week we dove right into all the different materials you can add to objects. Our assignment was to take a pre-built room full of objects and add materials to them so that they looked a little more real. I tried to keep everything synced to the lesson, but I had some huge problems with the bundle of dynamite that was there. I had to make a new one just to put textures on it. I also took the taper off the barrels and turned them into oil barrels instead of barrels of gunpowder. I added a plane on the other side of the window and then added a picture of a jungle. I had some trouble with adding a rusted metal texture to the beams in the cealing without all the rust spots being in the same place. I eventually just made 7 copies of the same material and then offset it several different times. So, without further ado, here are the shots I took.

Logo Assignment

Our assignment this week was to design a logo using splines and other 2D shapes extruded and beveled out to be 3D objects. As I was thinking about what exactly to start as a shape for a logo, I came across an old movie on cable called Krull. Here is a poster for the movie.

The weird thing in the middle is a prop used in the movie and was called "The Glaive." It has a nice outline for a logo, so I goggled it and found this.

I wanted the image at a different rotation, so I altered it and stuck it in 3ds max as a reference. (This would cause a slight issue later, as the photo was an actual picture of the prop shot at a slight angle, and caused some for-shortening... It took a while for me to figure that out, but I digress.) 

I then beveled and extruded the spline, then I had to relax it, because it was having some weird curves that didn't flow well. After that I added a couple of circles attached together and beveled out. I added a reflective material to them both and started messing around with the text for the logo.

After about 40 iterations, I started taking renders about once every 10 or so. Here are some of them.

I liked the overall look, but I thought I needed to add more to the logo, like something to show movement. Also, I didn't like the 'G' in the font I chose, so I started the text over again. Oh, I also added a huge-ass sphere with a texture of an image of the sky at some point. (picture below) I took the spline of 'the glaive' and copied it twice, rotated them, and altered so that the edges didn't proceed the topmost one. I also ditched the extruded circles because I couldn't figure out how to make it more 'round' (it was showing corners). I created a Torus and put that in the circle's place. At this point I added some spotlights and started altering how the light was hitting the surfaces a little.  

I was close, so I fiddled with the angle of the text, the angle of the camera, and the angle of the spotlights until I got this.

Here are shots for different angles so you can see what's really going on here.

After all of that, I didn't like the text being in the center of the logo, so I moved it, bent it, rotated it, and moved spotlights around and got this.

Here is a shot at a different angle so you can see just how much the text had to be rotated to look level to the camera.

So, the final shot is this!