Hello,
This is my last work. I tried to put 7,62x51 NATO round into 3d. I have used walnut wood texture by Cyril5555 and border scout photo (due to round geometry his reflection is almost invisible) from wikicommons.
Renderer: cycles. No post-render effects.
I will appreciate every constructive criticism.
Hello,
I have updated this project. Rendered it with Cycles. This time I have added some post-production effects and a city map from pixabay.
Nobody commented previous work so I assume it wasn’t worth it. Maybe updated version will be good enough.
Those are bullets laying on the wooden table photographed by soldier but I am not a master of compositing, texturing, modelling or anything related to making good renders
Post pro effects are great and so is the lighting.
But the image yould use more samples and most importantly the bullets need a texture. usually the metal is scratched and dirty
A few things:
- The roughness needs to be lower.
- The roughness, spec map and spec normal map need to include tiny scratches (see reference here: http://www.sgammo.com/sites/default/files/IMG_2029_0.JPG). This will compensate for the reduced rougness and prevent it from being too mirror like.
- Something still looks a little odd in general. How are you mixing your gloss and diffuse? What are your gloss colours?
wow awesome 
is this inspired from Andrew Price’s work ?
Hello,
Thank you all for comments. I made some changes as you suggested. I’ve lowered roughness and added more bump effects. I can’t figure out what makes this image “odd” so I don’t know how to fix it.
Here is node setup for bullet shell and upgraded version of image:
The bullet tip material is basically the same but with different colors.
Yes I watched some of Andrew’s tutorials (thanks for your work Andrew) but this work was created because I was making M60 and I focused on bullet so much I didn’t finished the gun itself xD
Try scrapping the fresnel node. It’s important for non-metalic materials, but often not very good for clean metals. Try just using a mix node with a high glossy mix. If you really want to use the fresnel node, I believe you can use the fresnel output from the layer weight node into an RGB node, and replicate the reflectance v angle of incidence curve (RefractiveIndex.INFO has a few)…but to be honest, it will looks almost identical to a normal mix node since the gloss mix is usually so high.
As for the bump mapping, I would tone down the bump map strength applied to the diffuse texture, since tiny scratches are more visible from the light they reflect, rather then the shadows in the scratches. If you can find some textures of finger prints on glass, and then apply that as a modifier to the roughness values, then that might help hide the obvious CGI nature. Aside from well created materials, it’s random dirt, scratches, grime, dust, particles etc that help create the illusion of realism.
Hope the sperm look better, lets see the egg, chillin.
Hello,
I have mixed bullet materials with high glossy. I have also added scratch location dependent roughness value control. So in places with scratches roughness is lower to give more metallic like reflections as you mentioned. I have randomized roughness at whole surface too.
And added some dirt like tiny dots with bumpiness. But it seems like every render created with cycles have some “cartoon like” look. Even best renders from gallery.
Hi. I kinda like the scene so far, but I would decrease the Depth of Field a little bit - the last bullet (closest to the top of the image) looks really blurry. Also you may experiment with the lamp rotation and size because imho it casts really sharp shadow on the back of the bullets (the closest one to the viewer and the one in the center). And I would turn the glossiness down a bit as well and maybe saturate the whole image.
I’m not a cg pro or sth but that’s just what I would do.
Hello,
I have studied many reference images and tried many light/materials setups. This is my final image. I have added HDRI background to vary reflections and adjusted materials to look more like in reference photos. And added water bottle to make it more interesting. Hope you like it. Any criticism is welcome.
That looks a lot better. I started writing the post below last night before you had updated, but the info may still be useful to you so I’ve pasted it below: How are you lighting the scene? If you are using HDRi environmental image lighting, then try a few different images, it can greatly affect the quality of your render depending on how appropriate it is for your situation. Your metal still looks a bit strange. Try massively simplifying your node network and working backwards towards something that looks good. Start with a very reflective silver, bump free, material. Gradually adjust, and add back in the node components you want, and see at what point it stops looking metallic. Try and determine if that step is necessary, or perhaps incorrectly implemented for a metallic material.
Here’s a model that I made using the same advice from this thread. It was never meant to be viewed this close up (hence the simplified modelling of the bullets), and I have not tweaked the material to make scratches and grime look optimal at this distance, but I think it shows that you can get reasonable looking metallic objects this way:
Hello,
Thanks for your advice. But have i found that bullets looking less glossy like those on your image looks like that only when photographed in very dispersed light environment. I found that most bullet reference photos are made with such interior light or are tweaked in photoshop later. I made photos of brass and copper material on my own with low sunlight and when metal is polished and new its very glossy. Here it is an example of difussed light refernce http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/223_Remington.jpg and here direct strong light reference http://cdn6.bulkammo.com/media/wysiwyg/bulkammo/M855A1_image.jpg When i tried render it with lux render (render times were insane 
) it gives me even more glossy bullet with default copper metal material. For all those reasons I gave them so much glossiness. Thanks for feedback it always good to hear from more experienced people. Thanks all for replies. I learned a lot trying different suggestions.
