I picked up some sunglasses from a nearby Dollar Tree. I love the glasses and I get lots of questions and other comments about them. So, in honor of them, I have decided to a do a rendering of them. We can track my work here.
Material Study
Played with a bunch of nodes and tweaked lots of tweaks. Trying to match what the glasses are made out of the best that I can.
Material Study - again
Well, I used the same .blend file while playing with these materials. Unbeknownst to me, Blender does not SAVE un-assigned materials (unless you trigger it to!) ... so, I lost all of these materials. So, here is my follow-up series. Hopefully they are closer to the real thing!
p.s. : I downloaded and installed the Material Library VX add-on in Blender, so I can save these things across files. This should come in handy during future projects.
p.s. : I downloaded and installed the Material Library VX add-on in Blender, so I can save these things across files. This should come in handy during future projects.
Development
Alright. The materials are in a place I'd like them to be now. (They're saved too!) So, I began modelling the glasses themselves. I'm freehanding the frames themselves by just doing some box-extruding. I used a curve to do a basic shape of the lens so I could form the frame around it as I was doing my extrudes. I modeled one side while applying a mirror modifier to duplicate the other side while I shaped it. Will be tweaking the form and posting as I work on this here.
Renderings
As I work I like to do partial and full renderings with low samples to get an idea of how the look is developing. Here are the renders as I work...
Final
Okay, I added some subdivision modifiers to smooth things out a little and tweaked colors here and there. Overall, I think we're done.