Insect eye texture - where to begin?
robotlove
Posts: 0
I'd like to make a compound eye texture, the type of texture you would find on the eye of a fly (e.g., http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1314/1298899979_3e6bd50312.jpg), along the lines of what noggin has produced in Insect-I-Vore 'The Fly' (http://www.daz3d.com/insect-i-vore-the-fly). Basically, it would be a black texture with a uniform mesh of bumps.
I'm new to texturing and bump maps, can someone set me on the right path?. :)
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what programs are you using? what program do you plan to render in and what program are you using to paint your textures?
<--That. But once you're there, a good medium-contrast grid pattern should do it for the base texture AND the bump, probably. It's what I've used in the past. What's going to be more important is your shader for proper iridescence. This is something most easily achieved by putting different colors in diffuse, specular and reflection in DS; I don't know what program you're using so I won't go off on it in detail yet.</p>
I am planning to use Photoshop to paint the texture and Daz 3d for rendering the model. I have a good sense of how to create grid patterns in PS, so that's a good start, and will cover the bump and base textures as you suggest. Any advice you can provide about the diffuse/specular/reflection maps would be most appreciated!
The specular one will be the most visible if you put the highlight percent at around 60% and use Glossy Plastic or Glossy Metallic as your shader type. So you want that to be your primary color. In a lot of insects this would be a a darkish green, with a yellow for the reflection and maybe some sort of dark blue for the diffuse. You will definitely need to experiment a bit to get the exact color look you want, and you may need to put the grid in your spec channel too, test it and see.
I recommend your render settings have at least 4 raytrace depth and 8 or more pixel samples and your shading rate is under .6, and make sure there's an environment around the eye when you test it so it can reflect. This is a mistake a lot of people make when trying to create and test shiny reflective items.
Thanks!! I'm going to give this a shot when I get home from work.
In Photoshop I would use a pattern texture.
I've been tinkering with pattern textures, but I haven't been able to make anything nearly that nice.
Where did you find it?
Free and no need to log-in.
http://www.deviantart.com/resources/applications/patterns/?q=metal
You may want to experiment with the stuff until you like it; filters, transform...
Those texture patterns were very helpful, thanks. :)
So it looks like I have a decent start, however it's not quite as visible or reflective as I had hoped.
How can I make the bumps look more like this? http://images.sciencedaily.com/2012/10/121011141441-large.jpg
This is what I have for settings in Daz: http://i.imgur.com/jKyEing.png
Turn the bump strength to 100% and raise the min/max instead?
The eyes need some kind of specular effect. Since when you say you're using DAZ 3D, I assume you mean DAZ Studio, and not Carrara or Bryce, I can't help much with applying a specular effect.
If it were Carrara I'de open the shader in the texture room and crank the Highlight (brightness of the effect) to 100%, and lower the shininess (the specular or diffuse effect) to a value around 5%. This will spread out the specular effect. The texture in the bump channel will break up the effect and really show off the segmented eyes.
He's getting no effect of the specular at all, though. I'm wondering if there is just no specular light in the scene. Is that 100% UE or AA? If so you do need to add a specular-only distant or spot for the spec effects to appear.
Lights in Studio need to be set to have a specular effect? They just don't produce one by virtue of hitting an object with a specular shader/texture?
Coming from Carrara, it's no wonder I had such difficulties on those few occasions when I tried rendering a scene in D/S. I would get horribly frustrated. A lot has to do with what you start learning with of course.
The default lights have specular effects when left set to "on" (they can also be set to "diffuse only" or "specular only"). The Advanced Ambient and UberEnvironment lights, however, have almost no specular effect on their own. One wants to use both or all three types in an ideal scene because of the greater volume and ambient occlusion effects added by the AA/UE lights. The only time I would not use these is in a scene with volume cameras (that can't work with them and transparencies, sometimes) or in order to deliberately get a "cheap and nasty" effect (which I very seldom want).
Nailed it! Or at least I think so :P
Thanks for everyone's help! I could not have done this so easily without all your advice. :)
Yes, this is nice. Looks good.
I would experiment with the color though; try red, not bright red, more like: rgb 180,0,0
You never know if that is an improvement over what you had in mind.
That looks like you've made some nice progress!
Looks good. :-)