Shot Glasses w/ physics

Back in November I built an image to experiment with the Falcon Renderer and Glass Textures. I like it, but even then I wanted to use the physics engine to scatter additional elements around randomly, to clutter it up a little, but I had never used it for anything beyond simple experiments. After a few months practice, I finally got back to that file.

The original image had a necklace I placed by hand - I didn't know how to alternate colors, so it is actually three different Particle splines based upon the same spline, one for each color, spaced out to accommodate all the beads and offset to keep them from stacking on each other.

The new image has a single Particle Spline necklace with a custom material that alternated between the three colors. It is also dropped onto fixed-position glasses, along with an array of doubloons and another array of confetti. Basically, I placed the glasses and let else fall randomly into the stage.

I think I can improve on the lighting, but I like the way the objects fell.

Before:
RD Shots Old.jpg

After:
RD Shots 6-14.jpg
 
Quite a party you've had.

I would make the picture more appealing if you got rid of the hdr-background. Also, a lot of the little stars somehow hang in the air, a few doublons, too (whose material looks kind of strange to me).
 
The stars rarely settle flat, and I have no clue why - Almost like a static charge does to real confetti. They were created the same way the discs and squares were - as a single polygon. I may have to apply a tiny amount of thickness to them, in case the physics engine needs depth to properly calculate mass.

The coins mostly fell normally, but a few would balance on the rims of the shot glasses in an unnatural way. Surprisingly, I've never seen one fall into a glass (the confetti lands on top of the glass's model box and slides completely off, but there are a few still floating above them). I'll probably convert the confetti to polygons and delete those manually. There's a gold coin balanced on its edge, too, which can happen but in this case may be needless clutter as well. I'll probably change the floater coin on the green glass rim to blue and see if that grounds it.

Building a material for the coins is a challenge. All of them I've seen are pretty garish, but their finishes range from flat/dull to shiny/metallic (but rarely as metallized as the necklaces). Regardless they all still feel a like cheap plastic, which they are. These are currently VERY saturated, and might blend tin better if I back off a little. I think I can use the bump pattern to very slightly emphasize the pattern using the diffuse color texture, since bump patterns are never really as pronounced as polygons. I'll need to make an image with a real alpha channel, I suppose.

There's a LOT of work to be done on the lighting. The white tabletop is what really popped the shot glasses, originally - covering it with clutter darkens the whole image notably. I do want enough background to imply the setting (indoors, dimly lit, and kind of scruffy, but not visible enough to identify it as a bar vs. a cheap apartment). I'll look around.

Thanks for your help!
 
Back
Top