Monthly Items

Nearly didn't make it this month. I had some problems with my netbook (spilled some liquid over it on Friday, I still have to clean the keyboard, I was just too frustrated to do it today) I use for modeling. But I still managed to finish this wall clock. The wall is a bit dark or rather the exposure is not correct (slowly my models behave more like reality, so I should use my photography skills).

I think it came out very well. There are still some problems with the clear cover you can see in the image to the right. Where the surface has a vertex there is some disturbing reflection. I think I have to do a bigger change to fix that, I think the best way would be, if the object wasn't a polyhedron at all. I should directly render the object as a rotation surface made from a spline. That way there would not be any hard edge.

But I think I get much better at modeling and defining materials. Both images are linked to bigger versions.

As I was finally able to render the cabinet, so I can show the images. This object was quite complex and might be classified as medium complexity. It uncovered a lot of problems and was the reason for quite some additions.

The materials are still very bad, they are mostly stand ins. I changed the Phong shader to handle the ambient part similar to the Ward BRDF so the problems to use both together get a bit smaller.

As I wrote some days ago, I think my shaders are not good, that is an area I have to do something about. I could in theory use my wood shader, but that too isn't very good. Additionally I couldn't handle the look in this case. The doors are big enough that in reality they wouldn't be covered by one piece of veneer, but by multiple. And that is something I can't do yet.

Finally I need some way to help in controlling the movement of the doors and the drawers. Currently I can turn the doors in every direction as far as I want. I can also move them, the same with the drawers. I would like to be able to constrain the movements, e.g. to the rotation around one axis and only between two fixed angles. I hope to find some time to add something simple like this soon.