specular painting
 

hi, this is an attempt to paint specular onto an image.

so I'll start with a cube, always a good place to start, have patience guys.

as you can see it is ready to extrude into 'something'

the tool sttings are 'faces together' but thats not important for the method i'm using here

you can not see in the above but i have chosen to draw in the curves to extrude faces to

i've selected 'faces' then he curve and then 'extrude face.'

the result of the extrude face

with the virtual slider I have incresed the divisions and it follows the curve

then with he virtual slider I have 'tapered' it, maybe a little 'twist' too

a few more of the same and I start on the top

until I get this

not real happy with the shape I draw another curve and

get this

by now you are sayig, 'what is this..?' patience!~ and then I go to the poly menu-smooth

and I get this

i delete the history of this thing

go to 'show' and select 'none' and then 'curves' and then delete the cures because I am not so interested in the shape of what is to come but the specular highlights, I could use the curves to change the 'branches' later but this is not about modelling as such.

I duplicste e few of the trees (yes that's what hey are, the maguc forest)

go to the top view and move them around forest like

addd a ground plane and scale a few trees to force perspective

add a camera so I can see what I'm doing outside 'perspective' and for a change of environment colour later which will be important with refractions

two views, two heads are better than one, perspective and camera 1

the ground plane needs a texture, I chose 'concrete' but that's not what I'll end up with because...

I click the blinn node and click the 'inputs and outputs' icon to see the conections so I can

drag the file onto the blinn node and when the contect conections menu comes up I chose not colour but 'bump map'

up comes the bump map node and I click it or 'control A' to get to the attributes and set it sort of high, well higher than concrete anyway

lup it comes and I set the bump depth at '.3'

we need light so I add a piont light

let there be light

I set a light blue colour for 'enviroment' on camera 1's attributes

I go to the piont light attributes and give a little yellow for the sun and for 'shadows' pick a dark blue, nearly black, to give a better and more realistic shaow because of the blues reflected from the sky in the 'real world'.

give it a render and see what i have got

go to render globals and tick refractions then render to see what a have

the render, clearly the sky is giving some nice refractions to the ground plane, but this is where this wIP begins. I will be painting on specular colour next, but that will have to wait for a little while as I have to go out and do some stuff like pay bills ect.
we will seee how the results of that are later.

maybe the shadows could be a little more darker blue??

I bring up paint 3D attributes and change the settings from paint 'colour' to paint 'specular.'

then i assign the 'assign texture', i used 512 for this.

I chose black to flood the ground plane and then I...

flooded it and choose white to paint the specular colour on with..

I adjusted the brush to suit with middle mouse button and 'b' keyboard and started to paint on the paint on the specular colour

giving it a sort of river shape or something like that, if anyone can improve on any of this that is why it is here, it is not a lesson as such...

I rendered it to see what I got, refractions are on in globals