BC4-1810 Homework, Jake Korosi

All right guys - I suppose you probably saw my mention in the main thread about my computer problems.  My system shuts down under a heavy graphical load.  When the issue started I did a little internetting to find the problem and it seems the most likely cause for my particular problem is a failing power supply.  So I bought one last week and it's in transit, but since tomorrow (Monday) is a federal holiday in the US and the mail doesn't run, I don't know if UPS still will be either, so I may not get the new power supply until Tuesday or Wednesday.  Sucks, but there it is.

Even trying to open Blender 2.8 immediately kills my computer as soon as the viewport loads, so no dice there.  I can get 2.7 to load up and at first it seemed stable; but it turns out trying to do much more than just spin my camera around the scene, also kills my system.  So I'm stuck not being able to do ANYthing Blender-related until that PSU arrives!

What that means is, no special lighting-match example from me for extra credit this week.

I do happen to have the exercises done, though - when I originally took those Fundamentals courses.  I really wanted to do updated versions to demonstrate what I've learned since then...but, well, I can't.  So I'll have to post the links to those older completed exercises.

Homework Submission, Week 1

Shading a Toy Truck exercise:

https://cgcookie.com/exercise_submissions/9541

Lighting a Simple Bedroom exercise:

https://cgcookie.com/exercise_submissions/9546

Assuming my PSU gets here on time (and as long as that fixes the problem, which I'm 95% certain it will), I'll be able to do some more substantial work and participate a bit better next week.  Sorry, Kent and everyone!

jakeblended hey Jake. Don't worry you're work looks great I like it. Nice work. I look forward to more :) 

jakeblended Man, that sucks.. you got some bad mojo with your computer! Glad you had at least your old exercises to send in as homework. I hope the new part solves the problem, best of luck!

jakeblended Well, you can only do so much with what you've got, but hey, no worries.  I hope the new PSU will solve your problems because I understand how frustrating it is to not be able to create something awesome.  Otherwise, looks good.

Hey there everyone!  Seeing great stuff as always in everyone's threads.

This week I used my old Chevy truck from the June vehicle modeling class.  So this truck - it comes from an era where auto paint was...somewhat simpler than it is now.  Car paints of this period were more or less a solid enamel with a glossy topcoat.  That means now metallic fleck, no color-depth or iridescent reflection properties.  Certainly you can find old old vehicles that have been tricked out in the modern day with these kinds of paints; but I wanted to keep a little authenticity for my own vehicle.

That said, a glossy solid diffuse paint is rather boring.  Aside from which, I already made one, for my renders for the vehicle class.  So this time I wanted to take that paint and use the tricks Kent taught in the live stream to age up the paint job considerably.  My aim was vehicle paint that is taken care of, but nevertheless is old, a little faded and scuffed in places.  I took some experimentation but I didn't run into too much trouble and I got pretty close to what I was aiming for as far as the paint goes.

That said...my nemesis this week was glass.  Eevee does not do glass the same way as Cycles did, at all.  When I first imported the truck project into 2.8, all of my glass everywhere looked solid and gold-plated.  Which is a neat look for a spaceship but not so much for a vehicle.

Door glass was simple enough - a Principled shader with transmission cranked up and alpha blend mode.  The real problem I struggled with was my headlights.  The headlights I made for this vehicle aren't just simple rounded domes.  I've got the light dispersion pattern actually modeled into the back sides of the lenses, because I wanted to simulate the look of old-style headlight lenses closely and I didn't think a simple texture would do that well for me.  In Cycles with a simple glass shader this worked out perfectly - but Eevee would NOT cooperate with this idea.  We argued over it for quite a while.  Hours and hours, working on those stupid headlight shaders, trying about five different approaches and NONE of them worked well except the last one, I mixed a glass shader and a transparency shader, and I had to turn the IOR on the glass shader up to something absolutely ridiculous.  But....it got close, I guess.  As of now, Eevee really struggles with glass of any non-uniform thickness, or glass in front of other glass, or reflective surfaces (like chrome or glossy paint) behind glass.  

For the renders with the lit headlights, I created a new emission shader material for the insides of the different lamp housings, and then changed the blend mode on the lamp glass from "alpha blend" to "multiply".  I also adjusted the mix factor to heavily favor the glass shader, something like 0.97, which I was hoping would let some of the glass shape through (fat chance, ha), but ended up just giving the lights a nice warmth, which for older-style headlights is right on.

So with all that said,

Homework Submission, Week 2

With lights on:

From the back:

Those darn headlights:

Was a fun week, despite the pain.  I was too happy about my computer being fixed to complain.

Ready for next week!

jakeblended Ah yes, the struggle with glass, read that a lot this week. Turned out nice so great job! I really like how your car looks 😄 Also glad your computer is behaving now 😉