Week 15 - 6th January to 12th January 2014

Having trouble with the shaders for my pod racer. When adding the specular to tone down the chrome and add some dirt, all of a sudden the chrome goes all messy:

It turns out that Mudbox was saving TIFs with alpha channel transparency, and that probably caused the file node to feed an alpha channel rather than the greyscale from, say, the Red channel (thanks, Martin!).

Week 14 - 30th December to 5th January 2014

I’ve decided to rush in where angels fear to tread and go chrome. The mia_material_x_passes materials we were shown last term inspired me – the glossy chrome preset and it’s genuine Star Wars - the look of the Naboo Royal starship:

http://static4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130121220218/starwars/images/f/f2/NabooRoyalStarshipTatooine.png

Further madness: use Mudbox to paint dirt onto this model – a program I don’t really know. Actually this was not so bad, the software is straightforward and I quickly got some results. This is how it looked with the diffuse map in the perspective panel with default rendering selected.

Imagine my surprise when the following pale result ensued:

I realised this was probably due to all that shininess, so I produced a specular map in Mudbox. This did not improve things much. Need to revisit! :(