Needless Things

A long-running project has come to its end. I took up an idea of pauljs75_ and made a catalogue :slight_smile:


Please find more info about it in this post:




Enjoy and cheers

These are some interesting looking fittings, minoribus. Are they based on real ones, or are they completely of your own design? They have enough intricacy and bump map detail to look like legitimate objects. Very interesting and unusual results!

I actually have one those in my junk drawer in the garage.

Thank you, James. I followed my imagination. The idea of this thread is to create things of our daily life and to render them as realistic as I can. But at the same time I’ll add some extras to them which make them useless. You can’t use the fittings really, for example.

@MichelWeber, yes, it’s always good to have a selection of needless fittings at hand. :slight_smile:



Merry Christmas to you all!

Looks very cool, indeed! Rendered using Cycles? Care to share your setup? :smiley: Thanks!

Now this looks to be a fun thread. I will make it my New Years Resolution to find a use for your needless fittings, but I don’t think I’m going to find a use for that silverware. :slight_smile:

Wonderful idea.

very cool objects. If I were to recommend a tweek, it would be to make the threaded portions completely smooth rather than bump mapped. Assuming these parts are cast brass, threads are cut after the part has been cast, and so they wouldn’t show the texture of the mold like the rest of the part does. If you want to go the extra mile, the cast surfaces are slightly darker, and the cut surfaces are slightly lighter as well.

good job, though :slight_smile:

I understand what you mean now, minoribus. That is a very clever idea, and is a great way to get creative with new and unique images. I love the furry purple silverware you’ve created. It’s so interesting and bizarre you can’t help but like it!

Thank you, guys. I appreciate your feedback and your comments :slight_smile:

@orangecreative

Care to share your setup?

The images are rendered with Cycles. The silverware is done with an incredible count of 7000 samples to get a clear render and I used an HDRI with warm colors for the lighting. There are no other light sources in the scene. I did a little post processing in Blender by adding a glare node (to strengthen the photographic appearance by emulating a camera imperfection) and in Gimp I tuned the colors a little bit more into the warmer range.

Each part of the silverware parts has two particle systems which use a vertex group for the density. One particle system generates the minor fur and has a red color whereas the second has the longer hairs and the purple color.

If you have any further particular questions, don’t hesitate to ask me. :slight_smile:

@Harleynut, If you find any practical use case for the silverware I grant you the right to merchandise it at the H&H resort :wink:

@pcolapat and wolfred, I’m glad you like it :slight_smile:

@Wolfred, thanks for the valuable insight on the production process of the fittings. I may come back to this at some time and redo the parts you mentioned to make them more realistic.

@James, thank you for the compliment. It was a part of my idea to make this objects nice and attractive even if you can’t use them. It looks like it worked for the silverware :slight_smile:

Here is another needless thing :slight_smile:


I had loads of fun doing it, but a hard time to get a decent render. All that glass was producing endless fireflies and even 15.000 samples and MIS with a map size of 2048 didn’t kill them. So I had to use clamp and to do several test renders to find a clamp setting which preserves most of the precious highlights in that scene.

It’s now clamped at 17. I rendered again with 7000 samples and full global illumination. In this render I also did a little post work in the Compositor and in Gimp.


I like this one… the flowers came out great. I’m curious as to how long it took to render 7000 samples. The other thing that has peaked my curiosity is the front edge of the table. On your clay render, the edge looks very sharp… but on the final render it has a nice bevel. Did you make a change on this before doing the final render?

Thank you, Harleynut. Well, you know I have a fast render station … it took round about one hour to render … once I had fine tuned the settings during several other hours.

On your clay render, the edge looks very sharp… but on the final render it has a nice bevel. Did you make a change on this before doing the final render?

Yes, I used the bevel modifier to give it a 1 cm rounded corner with 10 segments.

Very nice work minorbus. Really creative.

Can I ask how you did the flower model. It looks like maybe a plane or thin cube and a warp tool, or curve modifier. I tried to sculpt a flower once but couldn’t get the area between the petals deep enough to look good so I tried making it face by face with took forever.

@Rhyeath: Thanks :slight_smile:

Your approach on the flower would be possible, perhaps, but my approach was simpler than your one. I wasn’t in the need to create a very highly detailed model, because of the DOF and the glass shader, which are hiding some details.

But you are right, I started with a primitive: I added a sphere and deleted one half. Then I modified the remaining half to form a petal. After that I duplicated it several times rotated it and modified every petal a little bit with proportional editing. In the end I had a flower. The flower has a subsurf modifier of 2. And you can also use a solidify modifier with a small value to add more realism to the petals.


What the beautiful collection minoribus! You really are a great artist.
I liked the clamp and how you worked with the glass material, so soft and breakable when compared with iron. Belíssimo.
It’s great to know I have a excelent professor.:eyebrowlift:

Minoribus, you have excelled yourself with these images. i love them! great stuff and keep them coming!

Thank you, CC, very kind of you. I feared that I overdid it when I played with the opposites of metal and glass. So I’m glad that you see it this way :slight_smile:

Hey, Monk, you posted while I was writing my last answer. Thanks a lot. I appreciate this especially, because your own artistic work was also an inspiration for me too, to make this :slight_smile: