3DThe new Silver Crystal!

Deks

Hello everyone.
Long time no see.
I had an itch to do something with my Silver Crystal mesh I made a long time ago, so I changed the reflection parameters in 3dsMax and then played around heavily with Photoshop.

I know its not Trek, but hey, I like Sailor Moon (manga and the original anime - though I have to say the new anime is better) as well.
:-)

Enjoy

EDIT: I made 2 pics. First one is more 'posterized', while the second one is a bit more smoother around the edges with some light particulate edges mods from PS.

Deks

This one is smooth without the particulate edges and the other one was modified a bit more... so make your choice.

trekki

Render time ? Render Machine ?
Very nice !

Samurai

Jesus, it's like dawn of the dead around here at the moment. Next thing we'll see Hobbes and Pic-a-Card popping in!

Not the foggiest what this is (not really an anime fan) but good to see you back

Deks

trekki

Render time: in the area of about 5 minutes for the base picture which is rather basic (everything else was about 30 mins of photoshop work).
Render mashine:
Acer Aspire 5930G, Intel Core2Duo P9600 (cpu), 240M (gpu), 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD, and 500GB Hitachi 7200 rpm hdd (in caddy - removed my dvd reader) - it's a 6 years and 5 months old laptop btw.


Samurai

This is supposed to be the Guinzishou - the Silver Crystal, an object around which most of the story from Sailor Moon manga and animes revolves.
As for this being 'the dawn of the dead'... nope. I check out SFM periodically anyway, I'm just busy with real life - but I'm also working slightly on my Nightfire mesh too (nothing noteworthy to post just yet, but probably will relatively 'soon').

EDIT: decided to upload the base 3d Studio Max render in this post to show just how much was modified in PS from the 'original' (which turned out rather well - some modifications in the effects in actual 3dSMax would likely allow for great animations - but I'd need a more powerful system for that kind of tinkering).

PS. Will probably get myself a new laptop when Skylake processors for laptops come out (have no intention on going with a desktop any more since I technically could afford a state of the art top end laptop) - until then, I'm sticking with this 6 and a half year old machine (which of course was severely modified/upgraded over time by myself).

evil_genius_180

Really cool work. It's interesting to see the base render, if only to see just how much post work was involved.

Deks

Tnx.
As I said... the 3ds max render is quite basic... the rest is Photoshop work.
For actual animation work and similar effects done directly in 3ds Max, I'd need a more powerful system, but I don't want to get Haswell based system when Broadwell and Skylake are around the corner.
If some of you remember, I mentioned at one point how I prefer when most of the 'touching up' comes out directly out of Max itself.

Any suggestions on possibly improving upon reflections and render time?
I guess I could use something else besides Scanline(if its faster), though, thus far, it seems reliable.

Deks

Modified and improved the central core mesh to resemble the actual silver crystal from the show (still need to work on the flower bits/petals though so it can be animated properly - was thinking on testing this crystal flower mesh opening up, but the petals need to be modified for that).

Heavily edited in Photoshop of course and the base render for comparison.