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Hey there folks, Brian Maffitt here
with Total Training. |
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To make your 3D scenes look their
best, you'll need to understand what's |
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happening with the various new 3D material
properties, so let's take a look |
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at a scene I just created for Total
Training Online. Here we |
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see a curved wall of Adobe CS6 icons
sitting atop a stage, which |
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is a simple vector shape that I
have extruded and rotated 90 |
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degrees. And there is a backdrop
which is just a simple plane |
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with a gradient applied to it to
simulate a column of light. |
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And I want to see our boxes and
backdrop reflected in the stage |
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but in a semi-realistic way. |
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If we just crank up the reflection
intensity, we'll get a mirrored |
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effect, but that's not what a stage
floor looks like. Even set |
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to 50%, it creates a better lit
result, but the reflections are |
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obviously fake. A stage floor can
be shiny but unless it's super |
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highly polished or wet, its shininess
will be more diffused. |
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We can control that with the Reflection
Sharpness Value. The |
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smaller the value, the blurrier
the reflection. In our case, |
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a value of about 80
looks right to me. |
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And in the real world, reflections
aren't absolute. They vary |
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based on the amount of light and
distance and even the density |
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of the atmosphere. |
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We can't control all of those things,
but we can simulate some |
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of it with the Reflection Rolloff
control. As I crank it up, |
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you see that the bright reflections
at the back of the stage |
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stay prominent, but the darker reflections
at the sides of the |
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stage become more subtle, giving
us a more pleasant result. |
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As for these last properties
related to transparency, |
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let me turn on our monolith layer
to reveal a large metallic |
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blob in the middle of the stage
with some reflections already |
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turned on. |
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But I don't want this to be a big
bronze lozenge. I want it to |
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be a big tank of water. |
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So I'll want to adjust our transparency
setting to about 50%, |
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revealing that we can see through
the monolith now but there |
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is no distortion like you would
get with a transparent solid |
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like a tank of water. For that,
we need to adjust the index of |
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refraction. This ranges from a value
of 1, which gives no distortion, |
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up to 5, which gives us basically
the same refraction you would |
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get from solid glass or water.
The more we crank this up, the |
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more distortion we see. And the
transparency rolloff adjustment |
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is subtle, but it lets you diminish
the refraction when the angle |
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of the object gets too steep, as
we see around the edges of our |
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cylinder. Obviously, this is an artistic
process and you'll tweak |
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these settings as you fine tune the
look of your scene. But with |
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only a little time and a few tweaks,
we are on our way towards |
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a satisfying-looking final
composition. |
