Prometheus pod

[Patrice Terrier]

Progress…

The long ambient occlusion work is over, i bake each of the texture at a size of 8192x8192, then using PSD to resize each of them to a much smaller size while preserving the antialias quality.
Now i have to find some good seamless and bump textures.

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

WOW! JUST WOW!!!

Can't wait to see the final result!!!

I am really in love with your latest render!!!

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

IMPORTANT TIP OF THE DAY

On default, the Gooch fancy shader defines front facing surfaces in warm yellow, and back facing ones, in cool blue.

Shading Prometheus with the Gooch shader reveals many polygons on the outer surface of body_gray_81 mesh as back facing. Naturally, the AO ray tracer would render them pitch black. Those offending polygons are the cause of black artifacts in the Prometheus hull AO maps depicted in your renders. There may be yet more similar faulty meshes in the model.

You will have to reverse the winding/normals of those polygons manually in e.g. AccuTrans or your C4D (if it provides such an option) to get rid of the AO artifacts completely.

(He-he, sometimes there are unexpected benefits latent even in seemingly useless sheer trifles... )

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

To have the PP glow effect, we must have not only (FBO) PP proper but also map_Ke emissive maps working. The glow effect is based on the material emission component combined with multiply sub-scaled and gaussian blurred map_Ke's applied on top of the pre-rendered scene quad in the final post-processing pass.

And before we have genuine point and spot lights (alongside directional lights) in our renderer, we should also introduce light maps to be able to (cheaply) emulate locally lit areas similar to what's seen in the closeup below. You won't believe how much more attraction and credibility can the light maps bring to your models...

[Patrice Terrier]

While looking closely at the pod screen shot you posted, i can see that there is a wrong leg placement in the current 3D model.
I shall see how to fix it.
 

[Patrice Terrier]

i thought i was ready to post the release candidate, however a closer Goosh shading inspection shows me a few more glitches to fix

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

Don't get upset, my friend! The perfect results you usually get matter much more than a few extra idling hours I might spend awaiting them.

[Patrice Terrier]

Here is the release candidate version… ouch 

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Of course I could say there are still an occasional back facing tri or two here and there but honestly, that would be nothing but unthankful nit picking in a model like this.

Prometheus is going to be one of the gem stones in your collection.

[Patrice Terrier]

I have released the official version there:
http://www.objreader.com/index.php?topic=22.msg990#msg990
with further back facing cleanup...

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

The model looks awesome, thank you!