Steampunk Stag - Blender Guru Competition - WIP

Hi all.
In this thread I will post progress updates for my Blender Guru steampunk competition entry.
I am trying to create a steampunk stag/reindeer, and will be eager to receive feedback and comments.

Current State:


Body and head started:


Matcap shading and a shoulder:


More to come. Comments/critiques welcome.

3 image per thread limit, apparently, so two more here.
AO with two legs:


Four legs:



EDIT: any way of making the most recent image show up as the thumbnail for the thread? Thanks.

Oh crap, why does this one have to be so danged competitive :stuck_out_tongue: Great work!

For my entry I am trying to focus on mechanical functionality for now, details will come later. You are ahead I think. Good luck :slight_smile:

Ha, that’s my reaction to everyone else’s entries!

I look forward to seeing yours, and yes, I like the idea of focusing on mechanical functionality. Just throwing gears and pistons on for the sake of it (although I may be slightly guilty of this) does not produce a convincing image. If you focus on the functionality, everything will look realistic and not too overdone. Good luck to you also.

Quick render. I probably won’t be using this material, it’s too gold and not brassy enough.


Another render with a brass material, courtesy of El Brujo de la Tribu. I really like this material; he’s done a really good job with it, so all credit to him.


Trying out a pose. I quite like this one, but I’m also considering one with the stag rearing up like a horse does.



Edit: Forgot to save the pose after rendering it. I’ve remade it, but it is slightly different, unfortunately.

Beautiful! reminds me of Syberia(game)

Looking good!

I like it a lot!

This is very encouraging, given how fantastic your entry looks at the moment.

Right, here’s where I could do with some input from the Blender community. I’m pleased with the brass material I’ve got (note the small scratches on the next plates (and the large scratches on the head - not too sure about these)) but the chrome material looks a bit off. I am going to apply it to the large exhaust pipe coming out of the engine too; however, I forgot to do so in this render. How does everyone else feel about the chrome material? Does it compliment the brass well?


The other thing is I’m going to need at least one more material in order to make it look a bit less plain and ordinary. What should that be? A darker brass? Wood? Leather? I’d value some input here.
(And please excuse the white… thing in the top left corner, it was from on object that I didn’t realise would be in the render until it was too late.)
Thanks.

This is very nice.

Now I maybe tying the noose around my own neck, as I may contend in the same contest, however, I would say if anything it has to be grungy. Steampunk is supposed to be sort of either old school - 1900s - or somewhat post apocalyptic. If you going old school it’s 1900s England mostly for the theme so it’s dirty - a country of coal. Or it’s old style wild west gunslinger… WWW (wild wild west, the movie is a basic idea). If you’re going post apocalyptic it doesn’t need to be described.

Steampunk isn’t nice, new, shiny.

EDIT: So this post here is just a big mistake, but a learning experience nonetheless. tl;dr I did something fairly simple in a very long-winded way.

Okay, so I’m trying to make it so that the antlers are textured just like real antlers would be, so it looks like someone has just bolted a pair of real antlers onto a steampunk deer. Antlers are very worn down at the tips, and are therefore a much brighter colour.
I have been trying to emulate this with my antlers; however, it has been very difficult, as there is no node (correct me if I’m wrong) that will just shade the tip of something, and so I have had to use math nodes and the geometry ‘position’ to isolate the correct part of the antler to be shaded. Here is the setup and the results:


Here I have drawn a diagram which I hope better explains how the tips have been isolated:



However, unlike this diagram, the boundaries do not have an upper edge, and so go on forever upwards in the z direction. This is not a problem.

Here is one portion of the node setup, which gives a bottom boundary, a left boundary and right boundary. If a face lies within these boundaries, it is shaded white. If not, it is shaded black.


As there are five tips to be shaded on each side, there are five of this group, each with slightly different values.

As you can see, there is a problem in that the border between black and white is a solid line. Is there any way of blurring this?

EDIT: After doing all of this, I now realise that it would have been so much easier just to use VERTEX PAINT. This is why you should think about other solutions before you get too bogged down in details.

The best option is to uv map them and paint them, don’t use vertex paint for this

I like it but it’s too shiny. True steampunk is rarely shiny / new looking. Look up steampunk on pinterest to see, a general google / yahoo search just shows the poor versions.

Right, I’ve been working on a material for some of the plated areas of the stag, such as his neck and the plate that covers his shoulders. I’ve gone for a metal that has been painted black. Whilst I’m happy with how the material turned out, I’m not sure it fits too well with the steampunk theme. I may therefore not use it, but this puts me in need of another metal material, preferably black.

All of it is procedural, apart form the normal map (which is way too strong right now), which is just a texture converted into a height map then plugged into the ‘bump’ node.
I have used the FakeAO shader from bwide’s node pack in order to locate the edges - no vertex painting was used at all - it’s all done with shaders.


If anyone would like I can post the node setup.

A step in the right direction with the material. I’ve tried many different ones, and this is the best I’ve made so far:


The black material still isn’t right though.

Great job on this so far, looking forward to your continued progress.

could you post bthe nodes? very cool!

As Scalla has asked for the node setup for the chipped edges material, here it is. This version is simplified in order to focus on getting the chipped edges, and does not involve any kind of bump mapping or spec mapping.


For this you will require the bwide node pack
The key thing with this is to experiment with all the settings. You can get different shaped chips by changing up the procedural textures in the “chips” frame.
No vertex painting or textures are required, which makes it great for if you have many objects to apply the material to.
It could be improved by displacing the paint, so it looks like the paint is a layer on top of the metal.