Guitar Pickup
 

Hey guys its been a while since ive been here but just finished a quick project (mostly as a bit of practice) of a guitar pickup. Total time was about 2hrs. Any crits welcome.

http://photos-a.ll.facebook.com/phot...44632_4325.jpg

T

looks nice big t,

i think things like this look more cg because they have perfect edges. you could try pulling a vert or two out of alignment.

its real nice for 2 hours work tho. :)

Hey thanks for the comment. The problem with that is plastic things generally are perfect so its hard to make it non cg looking. If anyone has any tips on that would be very usful! The only other option is to dirty it up using textures but again hard for 'perfect' objects.

ha! for some reason i thought it was painted/covered metal... i have no idea why

"plastic things generally are perfect"

Trust me nothing is perfect if you look closely you will see imperfections even in plastic.

Your model could alos use an ambient occlusion pass because as of now it has that floating look.
A neat trick is lighting the scene with a spotlight and under the mental ray tab of the attr editor select area light this will create nice and soft shadows(no more softboxes)

ok maybe 'practically perfect' would have been a better choice of words. Thanks for the comment. im still learning how to do good renders.

This is just a basic maya render im not 100% sure how to use ambient occlusion. I found a tutorial on how to make a render using it but now what do i do with it?! ive tried using photoshop to incorperate it but i dont really see much difference.

Again any help much appreciated.


Here is what i came up with...

http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-...46842_8351.jpg

Seems only minor difference for the better - again im not 100% sure what im supposed to be doing :D

I've put a simple scene in the attachment, i've made the scene using Maya2008 but i saved a MA file aswell.

The mental ray area light is basically sort of a softbox you don't see much difference in this scene but i have used it quite a lot it gives softer shadows without upping shadow rays to much :)

Good luck:beer:

i do my AO slightly differently...


if you want an AO pass, just select everything, go to render next to the layer bit in the bottom right side of the screen. click on that and you are in the render layer bit.
make a new layer assigning everything to it. (its the button with the blue ball on it)
right click go to presets> occlusion

once you have done that just find the occlusion node (click on tte surface shader in the hypershade and then click on the out arrow on the out colour. change the samples to whatever you want, but remember to change the max distance to something smart like 5 or whatever -depends on the scene-

render.

occlusion done.

Mastone : Thanks for that i understand it a little better now, it is very subtle but i can tell that using the spotlight as a mental ray area light just softens the whole thing slightly.

Hammer: I just tried doing it your way and its a lot faster - (the 1st time i got lost but makes sense now) very fast and gives good results without faffing with the scene.

Thanks guys!