dragonfly wing

[Exon]

I've modeled a fairly detailed dragonfly wing. I'm having problems getting a good looking wing material, though (the clear wing film, not the ribs).. Any ideas?

Thanks,

-Matthew

[percydaman]

can you post some images of what you have so far?

[Exon]

Yes, sorry about that..

Here is my model:

http://www.trinitifx.com/wip/wings_model.jpg

Here is one frame in the composite:

http://www.trinitifx.com/wip/wing_comp.jpg

Here is the max file, if you want to take a peek:

http://www.trinitifx.com/wip/wing.zip

I can't get the wings' film to be shiny, yet transparent. Here they are just rendered over the background, but then I can't color correct or adjust sharpness (to match the background plate) in combustion.

This takes 20 mins to render on my machine, of a 180 frame sequence (the bug boy stands up and runs after the car). Plus I want to have the wings buzzing and flapping, which will have motion blur. Any way to speed up the renders?



Thanks

-Matthew

[percydaman]

looks to me like you just need to add the translucency you see in these type of wings. They definitely need to reflect their environment, so maybe add a colored noise map in your reflect slot so that whatever it reflects in the scene (thats on you) it will show up as colored reflection like you see in real dragonfly wings.

[Shimakaze]

Well either add translucency or make the wings partly refractive. if it were me I'd probably do a mixture of different things along with some falloff maps to break things up a little. to make the image render faster use Adaptive QMC sampler instead of the Adaptive Subdivision one. For an image like this with so many blurry effects it's a lot more efficient.
Also, the pictures you used in the environment and environment override slots should probably be set to spherical environment...

[Exon]

Thanks, guys..

I'll play with yall's suggestions. I swear I have the hardest time understanding VRay materials..

This is due Sunday!

-Matthew

[Exon]

How come changing the opacity (dropping a VRayColor map into the opacity map slot is what I'm doing) affects rendering time so much? I can't get a transparent material on the wing film without adjusting the opacity, unless I render in two passes (one for the wing film, one for the wing ribs). This will be composited into the scene using combustion.

-Matthew

[RErender]

I threw this mat on and tweaked the base Highlight specularity and color a bit and it look kind of cool, need a couple of lights for the speculars.

http://www.vray-materials.de/all_materials.php?mat=331

[Exon]

Wow, that site is amazing..!

However, when I drop that material on my wings, all I get are black rectangles..



-Matthew

[Exon]

I finally got something close to what I want:

http://www.trinitifx.com/mwb/shot_nine_3s.mov

I'm still tweaking the wing film texture, though. Why does it take SO LONG for the wing film to render? It's just an extruded spline. Even if I hide everything and just render the wing film with a default vray material (no reflection/refraction/trasparency/translucenty/anything), it still takes like 8 mins a frame. What am I doing wrong?

-Matthew

[percydaman]

looks pretty good. I'd push the 'colored translucency' look just a bit more. My guess as to your render times is that you have alot of geometry there for those wings. Also vray doesn't like lack of opacity very much.

[Exon]

My guess as to your render times is that you have alot of geometry there for those wings. Also vray doesn't like lack of opacity very much.

???

The actual wing film is just an extruded (set to '0') spline shape...

206 verts, 408 faces.. Right now it has no transparency, I'm controlling that in combustion (rendering the wing film and the wing ribs seperately)..

The wings' ribs have thousands of verts and faces, yet they render in seconds..

Something is wrong somewhere..

-Matthew

[dominiquelaksmana]

doesn't extrude with 0 value still has 2 face back and front? might want to collapse to editable poly rather than extrude.. well i maybe wrong.. but if i extrude spline with 0 value, i always get double face effect from vray.

[DaForce]

Yeah if you extrude with 0 you will get double faces. Best to extrude by a very small amount.

[Exon]

Ahh,

I'll check that tonight..

Thanks!

EDIT: extruding to 3mm cut my render time almost in half! Great advice, thank you so much!


-Matthew