Crystal Arrows

[oDDity]

It's better, but are you sure you have all the ray tracing options turned on in the render options tab?

[Darkness_Falls]

Hmm, I'll have to check that...

[oDDity]

Also make sure you have double sided turned on for the crystal surface.

IN fact always turn double sided on for everything when rendering in lightwave, because shadows can looks strange or missing if you don't.

[Subjective Effect]

I had this idea about the elemental crystals.

 

Fire crystals should look slightly "flamey". The one you did was perfect oDDity.

 

Water crystals should be smoother and look like a drop of water.

Gas crystals should have a bubbley surface with bubbles inside them to represent the gas pockets.

Moss arrows should have that iron filings on a magnet look. Spikey but organic. Similar to this: http://www.cumberlandadventures.com/cave/cede2.html

 

Thoughts people?

[Darkness_Falls]

Cool ~ turning double-sided polys helped get the color I wanted and stuff. But it still looks weird where the light hits, etc. I guess it's probably something in my texture or bump mapping that is making this thing not be clear. Or a light or two too bright. I'll try again tonight after work. I hate how I have to wait an hour or two for it to render. Is that what you have to do, too, oDDity? Or is your PC faster? Maybe only having 512MB RAM is screwing me over with the speed of this, too. Do you render into 1600 x 1200, or 1024 x 768? And what is your setting for anti-aliasing usually (low, med, high, very high)?

 

@SE:

Fire - I agree. I'd prefer if oDD's concept was taken a step farther by having extruding jaggies- per my concept art - but I'm okay either way.

Water - Partially agree. Don't feel it should look like a big frozen water droplet, for instance. Again, something more like the concept I'm working on is what I'd prefer. It's somewhat drop shaped, but not rounded/polished smoothe. Need to have some crystalline angles. I would like it if my concept had an inner pocket to house the water effects, like TDS' concept art, but my model doesn't yet show this. That's my next step for practice.

Gas - Sure. I think TDS' Concept Art - Crystals was half-way there. (Notice the water arrow's inner-pocket, too.

Moss - Woulnd't really be my preference.

[oDDity]

It shouldn't be taking more than a few minutes to render thoese few polygons, even with a couple of area lights. As I showed you in the video, I use fprime to render. You can buy it from www.worley.com, or use emule. It lets you interactively adjust your lights and textures and see the results render in near realtime.