The fun part! What about some materials?

I personally love the process of creating materials. I don´t really like the lighting process and I´m not very keen on the rigging-stuff. But I love materials! Choosing the right materials, you can even make a bad mesh look better. When I look back, I would not create the materials for “Lonely and left behind” the same way as I did it. I still like the orange parts, but I would certainly choose a different material for the rusted parts.

Anyway – Most of those materials are mixed procedural materials, that means the materials don´t need any real bitmap textures, they work – well procedural! Also the objects don´t need any mapping-coordinates, which also speeds up the whole process. The problem with procedurals is, that you can hardly define creative details within your texture, like single scratches or bumps. As I said earlier, I wanted to finish this model in a short amount of time, so I decided to create procedural materials.
I always work in the same way: I first create a clean base-material. For example, a fresnel reflecting orange material was used for the base-layer of the face.
Then the material is getting transformed into a “blend” material and a second material is inserted in slot 2. This time I would go for a slighlty brown shaded grey colour with a crusty surface. I wanted this poor old bot to look like he had been forgotten in his docking station, still starring at the sky where his ship disappeared. He´s standing in the rain, getting covered with dust and dirt over the years.
So I created this dirt-crust layer and mixed both materials with some fine-tuned noise-maps (high contrast, high detail-level). I also used some glossy-reflections which looked great combined with the raindrops. It just gave the whole material a very greasy look. I often use simbiont materials as well (simbionts is a free-plugin and can be downloaded here: http://www.darksim.com/html/simbiont.html)

All of the materials were created in the same way. I first decided, which basic material the object is made of (for example: metal, plastic, rubber…) and created a clean version. Then I thought about how the material would probably behave when getting into contact with dirt and fluids. Afterwards dirt-layers were created and mixed into the clean materials.

The raindrops were also created using a scatter-compund object. Because I wanted those drops on the entire mesh, I selected every part of the model, grouped them and cloned the group. I hid the first group and then ungrouped the second one. I did this just to make sure that I don´t accidentally create one part twice and forget to delete it afterwards, that would produce render-errors. Now I converted the whole selection into editably polys and ataached them to one object. Now I created a simple sphere (very low poly) and applied a water-material to it. Then I used the scatter-compound-object to scatter 2500 raindrops on the whole model, which were then randomly scaled, squashed and rotatet to alter the look of the individual raindrops. I know that the behaviour of the raindrops is not realistic! If you´d put a model under strong rain for a longer time, you wouldn´t see any raindrops at all because the whole model would be covered with a thin layer of water. Also raindrops would normally run down a surface and create a trail – but first of all I didn´t have the time to really think about how to solve this problem… secondly, I had decided earlier to create greasy surfaces and that actually made sense. Water doesn´t run down greasy surfaces and create trails at the same time – only little drops. So that was fine.

The lighting for this scene was very simple.
I basically wanted a rainy, cloudy, dark atmosphere, on the other hand I wanted a clear direction for the light. It looked good to align the light with the rain, it created a harmonic look. I also decided that the viewing direction of the face would probably be the best direction fot the light and the rain to come from, so that issue was clear.

I placed a quite strong spotlight above the model and moved it slightly into the direction of the camera to avoid a perfect symmetrie of light and shadows. Two additional spots gave a little bit of “contra-light” which is helpful to avoid black shadows and to light the darker areas.
Then I made rough a light-sphere (also refered as light-dome) consisting of 24 omni-lights which are aligned in an almost spherical shape (I did not keep to the basic spherical shape here, I adjusted the position of the lights to simulate diffuse light coming from above, from the sides and reflected light from the ground!). They´re all instances (except the upper lights) and have the same intensity and color. This way you can fake a global illumination for most of the “stand-alone-models”. Some fine tuning on the shadow-paramteres gave the lighting some smooth shadows (Shadow-Map: Paramters-Rollout – Bias set to 0,01, mapsize set to 1024 and sampling rate set to 15).