Needless Things

[minoribus]

Hey fellow blender artists, here is another one … the frequent traveler’s collapsible bottle opener. I was astonished that such simple forms like the bottle opener and the bottle caps wasn’t that simple

Technically this is rendered in Cycles at 3000 passes. It uses an HDRI at 0.2 for the general lighting and an additional three point lighting to create a rim on the bottle opener and several coloured bounce lights.The beermat has a particle system (type hair) to create the little fuzz that these things show.

This is a WIP thread and so I’m open for comments and suggestions on what is good and what not

[MichelWeber]

Good stuff. What are the two little things on the triangle part? Hinges?

[minoribus]

Thank you, MichelWeber. Yes, these are also hinges - to prevent it from being a useful thing :yes:

[minoribus]

Because I had to think about how I would model the bottle cap, I made this mini how to.
Perhaps this is of some interest for someone.

[CCTrevis]

Hey Minoribus,
every job you post, I’m more impressed. Putz … the latter is amazing in every way, modeling, texturing, material and concept. Pure art.

Just a small note: it seems to me there is a letter envelope at the left corner. Wouldn’t it be a bit disproportional to the other elements of the scene?

[CCTrevis]

[QUOTE=minoribus;2546069]Because I had to think about how I would model the bottle cap, I made this mini how to.
Perhaps this is of some interest for someone.

QUOTE]

Excelent!!!

[theoldghost]

minoribus I’m sorry about Michael Schumacher. He is a great champion and I had hoped he would have a long well deserved retirement. But, at forty four maybe that is not to be. I had heard but the regular American evening news networks did segments tonight. I guess we can still hope for a miracle even now.

[minoribus]

@CC, thank you!

Ghost,

I guess we can still hope for a miracle even now.

Yeah, I’ve heard his helmet broke when he was skiing and that he has severe head injuries.
Let’s hope that he will win this fight also!!

[minoribus]

Here is an updated rendition of the bottle opener.

This time I rendered in full HD. And I corrected a mistake with one of the drops which was hovering over the table. I did some additional color correction in Gimp and I tested some other things regarding the realism.

@CC, I forgot to answer to your question in my last post. The letter is much bigger and you can only see a small corner of it in the scene. I think the texture scale of the blue and red stripes gives a good estimation of the size of the letter.

“Always bevel your edges”, even for the smallest ones. Sounds funny, and I would not have thought, that it would make a real difference with the bottle caps. But look at this comparison:

In the left one the is no bevelling. And although bottle caps do have sharp edges, the right one with a tiny amount of the solidify modifier and with one additional edge loop near the bottom looks better. In the solidify settings I used the amount of 0.1mm (!), because I use real world sizes in this scene. Please note that this settings do not produce such a nice rim without the additional edge loop. And it was also necessary to set the offset of the modifier to 0.

“More samples for problematic areas” had some effect in this scene. I rendered the image completely with 5000 samples and after that I rendered small areas of it with 15,000 and with 30,000 samples. That did not take that long, because I only rendered small areas. Here is a comparison between 15K samples (left) and 30K samples (right). Look at the white glossy line on the glass.

This area is problematic because of two facts. a) It is glossy, and b) it is blurred because of the DOF. I made the observation that Cycles tends to produce this bright pixels in areas that are blurred. So it may be an option to do the DOF in the compositor and not during render time if that matters.

In my case I used the re-rendered parts as overlays for my original render and that worked seamless, because the original render was already of high quality.

I think this has been the last render, that I post here this year, so I wish you all the best for the next year

[James_Candy]

That is an insane amount of attention paid to details, minoribus! I think you are the only one that knew about those small imperfections! But, it is very helpful for you to point them out and share how they can be corrected. I only just noticed the hair system on the beer mat. That is a great example of taking something that could have been done very quickly, and going the extra mile with it. It absolutely holds up even under close examination. Very good work.

I know you asked for comments to help improve; all I can think of is perhaps some fingerprints on the opener? I suppose it looks unusual for it to be spotless, and yet to have so many caps next to it. I imagine the person using it would have had their hands all over it to get those bottles opened.

Thanks as well for posting the clay render. It really shows off the nice modeling much more clearly. By the way, the glass vise was very nice, too. I had a good laugh when I saw that. Happy new year!

[CCTrevis]

Happy new year and thank you so much for your help in 2013 !!!

[minoribus]

Cheers guys and thank you for your kind words.

Today, with a fresh look on the letter, I scaled up the texture size to make the letter look bigger. Thanks for the heads up, CC, you’ve been right with that.

And I took a try on the idea of the fingerprints. That was a good recommendation, James. So here is, what I have produced.

And a clipping of the fingerprints in detail. I think they are subtle enough. They won’t be very visible on such a material anyway. It took several tries to find a good balance between subtle and yet visible.

[harleynut97]

I could have used your needless bottle opener last night Minoribus , I’m glad to see you have applied for a patent. Happy New Year and may there be many more needless things in 2014.

[Scott_Graham]

Sorry for german but it’s hard for my to point out tech. stuff in another language:
Hi Minoribus! Ist das Absicht, dass sich die 2 kleineren Gelenke gegenseitig sperren?
So kann man den Flaschenöffner vorne nicht zusammenklappen…
Sieht Hammer aus! Finde alle “unnützen Teile” echt genial von Umsetzung und Idee her!

[minoribus]

Harleynut, sounds like you had a good party over there The patent lawyer is sceptical, unfortunately. But maybe one of the next needless things will be a better candidate.

Scott, thanks for visiting my thread and thank you for your comment. I’m glad that you like my needless things. Thanks for asking about the front hinges - your welcome to do that in German I hope you don’t mind if I answer in English nevertheless

I knew that they would not work when I modelled the two small hinges at the front part. You can’t fold the front part really. But these hinges make the front part more unstable. And in such a way it is unusable in two respects. It will be hard to open bottles with it. And at the same time you can’t collapse it. Really a needless thing, I thought.

[Scott_Graham]

clever idea

[James_Candy]

Nice work on the fingerprints! I was even half joking when I suggested it, so it is even more impressive to see you add them! How did you achieve the effect? I imagine the prints are a mix of two different shaders, but because it is such a subtle effect, I cannot tell which ones.

[minoribus]

James, I’ll be glad then, that you were halfway joking, because that was a good recommendation For the fingerprints I used a little variation of the metal shader which I used for the bottle opener in general. I found a b/w image of a fingerprint on the net and I used that to control the mix factor of the two materials. So - your guess was right

I think I’ll call the bottle opener finished. It teases me to test one of the newer builds from buildbot with the new volumetrics for the glass material of the vise, but for the next update let’s see what I can do with this little beauty

Holes would be a good start, obviously …

[harleynut97]

Not sure what your going to do with it, maybe some springs on the handle?

[dns_di]

good start would be no bottom