Shading Basic Metal Surfaces:
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As shown in the last tutorial, metal surfaces have some substancial differences in appearance from plastics. |
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1. Create a new layer and paint another sphere onto it with the colour you've chosen for your metal texture. Paint the light effects onto this, with the hilights in the same positions as the plastic sphere, only but make these hilights brighter, wider in size and sharper-edged. The main light's hilight should be almost completely white with it's colour only visible around edges of this hilight. Even though they represent dimmer light-sources, the other two hilights will also display white centers. Only a smaller radius indicates that these lights are dimmer than your main light. The shadows on metal are much stronger as well, so you'll only find your base metal colour around the yellow halo of the main light's hilight. After that, the colour value darkens steeply towards near black in the areas furthest from the lightsources. The deepest shadows in metal are much darker than those on plastic. |
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2. Just as with the plastic tutorial, the metal sphere is used as a palette for laying down the base colours to start the shading. |
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3. More colours are picked and painted to help flesh out the shape. Notice how I haven't painted the full brilliance of the hilight from the main light across the length of the shell on top of the gun? This is because the direction this surface faces co-incides only with the edge of this hilight. The white areas will show up in details later on. |
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4. Once enough stroke of colour are applied, use a medium opacity brush to blend them all together to give a smooth surface. | ||
5. Next, the metallic details are rendered, which should be painted in a layer above your linework. These slits need to show that they are cut into the metal shell, so they'll have edges that can catch the light as well. In this case, the top edges of the circular slits catch full strength of the main light, so they form a strong white edge that thins out towards the sides. | ||
6. If you want this shell to appear a little more worn, you could try blending out the hilights on the slits out a little and add some very subtle hilights to the other edges as well. | ||
7. Finally, put a few battle-scars in a few of the smoother areas for better effect. Adding a little extra detail around the center of some of the panels helps to communicate it's form, but don't go overboard with it. For this gun, I'm trying to show that it's been hit a few times but overall, the hi-tech alloy is pretty scratch resistant. For the metallic object you're rendering, the right amount of detail is entirely up to you. | ||
8. All done. Now you have a basic metal surface on your object that reacts differently under the same lighting conditions as your plastic material. | ||
Rendering a Plastic Surface | Rendering Reflective Chrome | |
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