8/25/2012

Personal Project TESF: 1st Shading Pass

Last couple days I have been working on a first and quick shading pass, and tried to block the different materials as close as possible.
I like to do this before working on the textures just to see how the model is looking so far. Ofcourse, the result is a bunch of flat surfaces and doesn't look very interesting, but, hopefully, a nice texture work will mate it look better.





By the way, this flames are from real pictures, I just added to see how it looks. For the animation of the shots, I am going to have to build my own afterburner, and I want to get as close as the real ones, with that fireball pattern and rings. I think I have an idea of how I am going to achieve that result. It's going to need a lot of Dev process and will be very interesting but that will come way later, I still have so much work to do on the plane itself.

So in this first shading test what I wanted was to get close to the black paint that is covering most of the surface of the plane. I wanted to get a similar look and mimic the way it reflects light, like I said, without using textures, just to block out the shader.

It is actually a bit tricky to get a nice result until you start using textures. Plus, this plane has a very interesting paint. Usually military vehicles have a matte finished paint, but this one still reflects a bit, and blurs out the reflected environment.




It is very hard to see those reflections but there are there, specially when there is a bright light source (like the sun). That's why, in several reference pictures that I have, we can see those strong specular highlights, which are nothing but the reflection of the light sources.

Flying high, we see the reflection of the light source creating strong highlights of the surface of the plane.

We are able to see the screen of the monitor reflected on the bottom side of the blackbird, however, the reflections are so blurred that all the detail of the screen is lost.
I am not totally convinced with the shader of this black paint so far, but I think is a nice place to start. Also, bu doing this test without using textures, I realized that i was relying too much on textures for giving details, like those little panels and other details that this plane has. So I decided to work that on the geometry instead. It took me something like an extra day of adding those details and doing new UVs, but I think that will make it look better. Still, I am going to have to work on details like smaller panels and things like that in the texturing process, and enhance the look with bumps and spec maps.


This is a quick test I did. I just build a general shader with a couple of textures that I will use for random pieces of the blackbird. I applied it to the whole plane, just to see how would it look with some textures, and the result is looking promising to me.
I rendered a frame of it and did a quick comp in Photoshop, where I added the BG, the flames and some color correction.

So now I am ready to work on the textures and do the final shaders for the SR-71.

Let's go for it!!!!

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