Chrome Spheres over Checkered Planes

[pasithea]

I'm going to Hell for this.

Okay, but seriously... I've been watching these old videos and I realized that Maya's chromes don't have the look and feel of the old fakey looking chrome that was in a lot of the old renderers and you know. I sort of liked those old chromes. So I set about trying to reproduce it. I chose the checkered plane in part for humor but mostly for the same practical reasons that they were used in the past; to see how it looks against white and black.

I'm still not quite there yet. I think I need to get ahold of a chrome map and drop the resolution down to maybe 16-bit or even 8-bit colors to really get the look I want, but I'm getting closer.

Each of these spheres is a different method of trying to get to that point. Mixed Blinn and Phong textures.

Mind you, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this effect once I get there, I'm just monkeying around, but it's fun. :)

Comments

[zeeth_kyrah]

A green-chrome slime mold, oozing its way across a circuit board, leaving new patterns in its wake.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Too high-res! Needs to be photographed off the monitor!

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Quiet you, or I'll make you watch 'Night of the Guru' from the Amiga tape.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

You know... I still have source code for PovRay 1.2. I could probably write an exporter for Maya and bang it through a really old PovRay renderer. That might get me the effect I want. :)

[paka.livejournal.com]

Did I ever tell you about the idea for a demo which would be a chrome sphere moving through a pretty and obviously fake landscape? Possibly to Pink Floyd?

And then you'd have a fast truck out, and you'd see that the whole thing was a pinball machine in some sort of weird, alien pizza parlor, with a couple of fairly alien teens hanging out in front of the machine and shaking it?

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Hahaha! No. You never mentioned that at all. :)

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

I always wanted to get a bunch of colored plastic polyhedrons, mount them on wires, make them spin, and shoot them with a camera that I'd swoop around and among them, thus making a fake experimental-CGI film.

[shizouka.livejournal.com]

The ghosts of millions of Amiga user groups cried out in anguish and were suddenly silenced.