And now onto Stage 3: Materials, Lighting and Rendering – the main event! With the objects all UVed, there were a few things that needed to be done before I could start doing some test renders and truly get into the materials side of things.
Namely, finishing the building – it is, after all, in a barebones state – I first needed to instance all the relevant pieces around and make it all ‘complete’ as it was in Maya.
For this section it’s back to the old screenshot commentary format – easiest way to explain this without it becoming another wall of text.
Instancing the arch roofs so that the ArchSection can be completed – once completed, it could be instanced around. For all duplication purposes from here on out I used instancing – that way any changes to the parent I needed to make further down the line would update all of the children.
As I’d made sure to set a common central pivot point for all the objects at the origin, I could simply hold select all the objects I wanted to instance, and using the Rotate tool, rotate them 60′ with angle snapping whilst holding Shift to bring up the Clone Options. I then selected ‘Instance’ and 5 copies, and all the instances for those objects would be in the right place instantly.
In reference to the above caption, that being said, I did make sure to go back and double-check each object truly was in the right place. It’s always possible to make mistakes after all, with a project of this many components.
Once everything was copied around, I could begin applying very, very basic materials. At this stage, that meant a default white on everything but the glass, which, being so easy to create as a material, I just made there and then.
The settings for the initial glass material – pure white on reflect and refract, IOR of 1.6, and a highlight gloss of 0.8 – so the highlights do not appear mirror-perfect
A section of the final MultiSub material for the project (shown here to merely illustrate the principles of MultiSubs). The Material modifier applied to each object allowed me to change the materials for each very quickly by simply changing the ID number on the modifier to whatever corresponding number I wanted in the MultiSub. This way I was able to change all the glass to ‘3’ in a matter of minutes.
In the next post, we’ll look at the initial render tests and how they…didn’t exactly go as planned.
Stuart McInnes 