Microscopic Lump.

Hi All,

Does anyone have any tips on how to achieve a model that looks like this?


I assume it is mostly done with materials but wonder if some part of it might be done with modeling.

what about making a lump like object, then giving it a displace modifier with a clouds texture, then applying the modifier, selecting all vertexes and using alt S ( scale along normal )?
(edit) just a quick test…


In addition to the displace, you could also add a particle system to the lump with some metaballs as emitted objects.
But from here I don’t know how to turn the whole ting into a simple mesh in order to further edit it…

Maybe a nogo with metaballs, since they seem a bit wacky to me (strance things happening with the scene when trying to edit…)

Thanks for the tips. I tried out the metaball as particles and this gets me a lot closer. I like Modron’s lump object as a core.

Attachments



A little sculpting could help it along too I was thinking.

I just remembered an old trick. say you have a pebble and a potato, and you want to squish the pebble onto the potato…first you join the two objects, then you position the pebble next to the potato, then, turn on proportional editing, and move the pebble toward the potato surface.

Modron and Atom:
Do you know how to turn the particle/metaball thing into a mesh so one can do some additional sculpting?
I can’t find a way…

alt C ( convert to mesh ) may leave you with some ugly topology though. maybe crank the resolution up slightly before converting.
(edit) not sure that will work with a particle system involved…may have spoken too soon.

Thanks a lot, Alt C works indeed on the particles/metaballs.

@Modron: Someday I will figure out how to use the Blender brush system. The controls for brushes still seem very clumsy to me. It is probably operator error.

Here is my final scene BLEND file if anyone wants to take a look at the setup. I must say, however, that there is some bugginess in Blender using Metaballs as particles. Especially with Cycles viewport rendering turned on.

Attachments

27_cycles_microscopic_lump_1d.blend (196 KB)


For sculpting these kind of things, the blob brush would work good, enabling dyntopo.
You can have a look at this video tutorial for more information about the brushes:

It’s not surprising that it’s buggy, it’s surprising that it works at all. You must have quite a machine! I am digging through old blends to find this object done in a more pedestrian way but I probably titled it untitledx.x so it’s going to take a while…