Procedural Bump Nodes to Raise Centre

Procedural Bump Nodes to Raise Centre

I have a project with a huge amount of extruded splines.
I would like the faces of the extruded splines to be raised in the centre.

Is there a way to make a procedural bump that will accomplish this for me?

In the image attachment, I am trying to achieve this look without changing the geometry.

Thanks in advance!
--Shift Studio.

Are you trying to use a procedural shader on this frame? You need a bitmap to drive the bump and I don't think there is a way to combine the procedural material with a bitmap one. Someone may be able to correct me on that idea though.

Are you trying to create an ogee type shape on the frame? Any reason you can't build that shape into the spline itself? If you have some example of what you're trying to do, I may be able to help more.

Hi Swizl - thanks for the response.

In the image attached, you can see a 1/6 portion of the whole image, scaled to 25%.
You can see its fairly complex and this is only a small portion.

I decided to use extruded splines.

I would like to bring the front faces of the thicker pieces forward in the centre so there is more visual interest.

Building a centre line in the faces would be very time consuming if I wanted to use geometry.

UVing and texture mapping would also be a painful endeavour.
So I was wondering if there may be a way to do it proceduraly into the bump map.

Make sense?
Thanks for any advice!

Mmmh - I wonder if you´re really in the need of geometry of if some 2d shading will already do it.
Just a quick hack based on a color selection with some Core-imagery:

Cheers
Frank

Hi Frank. Yah that's a pretty good idea.
I've already experimented with some Photoshop effects (bevel and Emboss with contour) and alien skin eye candy ('Bevel' I believe)

The results are pretty good but not quite convincing enough. The artwork has to be composited with photographic elements. Also the 3D elements will be separated by depth so I need each element to cast appropriate reflections and shadows on farther away elements. So I've chosen 3-D to get the best photo-realistic look.
I have a few in ideas in mind to achieve what I want but all of them require a lot of work.

Thanks for your input - it's always appreciated.

Any other ideas are welcome.

Shift studio.

Maybe try some bumped gold material to make it look more handcrafted for instance:

Cheers
Frank

frank beckmann said:

Maybe try some bumped gold material to make it look more handcrafted for instance:

Cheers
Frank

Click to expand...

Yes, I agree.
I also have tried it - haha - and decided against it... but lately had been thinking about adding it back in - it'll give the surfaces more interesting light/reflections/pop/shininess/sparkle (whatever).

I also should have mentioned in my last post that as well as contouring the front faces of the extruded splines, they are also extruded along z axis.
Its just hard to see that on my image attachment above. Here is a closer one.

I still do have to extrude the wider pieces forward to a point - because that is what my client wants

Thanks yet again.
--Shift Studio.

Shift Studio said:

they are also extruded along z axis.
Its just hard to see that on my image attachment above. Here is a closer one..

Click to expand...

Same here - but the orthographic camera seems to eat up the best of it I guess:

Cheers
Frank

Yeah, I have a perspective camera, but field of view is low - 20 or 15 - I think.
I found z-extrusions to vary just the right amount from top to bottom with this FOV.

Yeah - that makes it solid gold (easy action).

Cheers
Frank