stonesoup's sketchbook

I stopped modeling for a while. Life has a way of kicking you to the curb sometimes. Here is a shot of something from the last project before I gave up on things… just as a way to get going again. I’ll try to keep this updated.


Model and dyntopo sculpt of column base. I was going to do a lot more with this, but somehow it never happened.

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I love the lions. How long did it take?

Having fun with shaders today. I put together a quick and dirty bronze material. Cycles is really powerful! :smiley:


Here is the node setup.


@DigitalEd: I had worked on and off that piece for about 2 months. It was my first digital sculpt and I found it very frustrating. I backtracked to older versions many times because I couldn’t get the proportions right.

After working up that shader I decided to crank out a render of my sculpt. I thought all the hard work I put into the base deserved a closeup to show off more detail. It took a few hours and used up all my memory. I only realized why when I noticed I had the subdivision surface modifier turned on to 2 with a 990k vert model. No wonder I ran out of RAM. :confused:


I hate that render now. It looks like chocolate not metal. So started working on the sculpt again, but got sidetracked by shader work. I wanted bronze. Then I found out about the fresnel node. After some trial and error I got something I’m much more happy with, but it still doesn’t look quit right.


I’ll have to keep experimenting.

After a great deal of trial and error, I finally have something that looks alright. Still looks a bit more goldish than bronze, but I think I’m done with this one. Here’s a render for you


And of course the shader setup for anyone who’s interested.


Here are some more renders. I’ve gotten pretty lazy with modeling so these are pretty simple setups. I’m still trying to find ways to improve lighting and materials.

Here’s a knurled cylinder. I experimented with lighting gradients - they make for more noise though so I needed more samples. It’s hard to see from the reflections, but the lights are blue at the edges and fade to transparency.


Here’s a steel floor I made out of tiles and array modifiers. I discovered environment maps and had fun with hdri setups. I thought this one looked best. Tweaking normals with matrix multiplication looks about the same as simply plugging values into surface displacement, but I didn’t realize this until I tested it. A couple hours down the drain but it was good math review. I used HDR 110 Tunnel from hdri-hub.com it’s in the free samples section.


Here’s a viewport shot of the tile I made. Nice and clean.


Another quick doodle featuring the one and only… suzanne! It started out as a materials test (I’m doing this all the time now, it’s really fun) but turned into a lighting exercise as I wanted to establish a mood - well, I do think poor suzanne is looking a little lost in the spotlight. Still not up to par with the amazing stuff I see here but who cares? I might as well have fun along the way. :smiley:


I love the lion faces on the columns (they are great!), but on their renders, I can’t tell what the rest of the stuff is. Loooove the steel floor and the Suzanne.

The lions are from the galleria vittorio emanuele II in Milan. It’s a detail from a balcony that I picked out of a zoom shot. Tbh I don’t know what those things on the column are either. I think they’re cabbages with wings. I have about 100 reference shots I picked up from trawling the internet. I was going to do a scene, but it was too much for me and I shelved the whole project. There’s a lot of baroque fancy on this building fusing animal and vegetable. My favorite detail is this ivy man capital. I forget exactly where I got it but here it is:


Minor update here: Materials test for brass… it’s kind of a noisy render… my computer is slow and I was getting impatient.


I also have a model of a lampshade:




Some experimenting with hair particles for abstract art. Things didn’t turn out how I expected, but that can be a good thing. I really need to learn more about this so I can have more control, especially in regard to optimization. Hair just kills my poor computer! This is cycles 250 samples and it took 18 hours to cook up. :frowning:


It looks weirder (and more exciting) up close. This is really cool! At 25 samples this is just a test render but it still took over an hour. Oh well.

The renders came out a bit dark so I cranked up the levels with curves. Didn’t do anything else postpro.

Some more fun with particle landscapes. Using mist turned out really well I think.


Here’s one in orange. I like the blue better though.


Some test renders. It’s funny how simple changes can affect the sense of scale.





Sorry life kicked you to the curb! It does that sometimes. Glad you’re back though, and from the look of what you’re doing here we’ll all be better for it! Keep it up!

@Xraygunner: thanks for being so thoughtful. Life has been hard these past few months, but it’s getting better. Since some time has passed, I might as well say what happened. My mother passed away this May. It was a violent death. I’m still torn between anger and grief, but I can’t change the past. All I can do is keep going… that’s all anyone can do, really.

Wow! Sorry to hear that. This world can be a terrible place… and a great place all at the same time. Keep living life though, we like the way you’re seeing it!

Thank you. I appreciate your thoughtfulness.

And now, for a little fun. Just a quick doodle, something to remind me that perfectionism often gets in the way of doing real work. I recently discovered volumetrics - now I have something else to play around with. :smiley: