Final Product

Here’s what we are going to create:

Step 1

Create a cube that has dimensions set to 135 x 327 x 68.

Step 2

Press F3 and go to Right view. Here choose B-Spline and draw a spline around the cube just like below.

Step 3

Create a Rectangle spline (Width: 4cm, Height: 130cm).

Step 4

Create Sweep NURBS then drag and drop both Rectangle and previous spline, we have just drawn, over the Sweep NURBS.

Step 5

Now resize the main cube object to fit in the border line. Here is the final result of main part of arm.

Step 6

Now create a sphere with 30 cm radius, over that arm.

Step 7

Press F3 to jump the right view. Here draw a shape with “Linear” spline tool like below.

Step 8

Now create a “Extrude NURBS” and make that spline the child of it then use the 9.5 value for movement of Extrude NURBS

Step 9

Copy that part and let them to hold the sphere object between them.

Step 10

Create another cube object as body (145 x 355 x 210)

Step 11

Now with rotate tool (R) turn the arm and connect it with body. Then copy that arm to create left arm. Here is the final result so far.

Step 12

Select the body cube and make it editable (C). Select the bottom face and apply extrude inner action with 6 cm offset.

Step 13

Now select the outer face of the bottom and extrude it just like below. Repeat that action for other 3 parts.

Step 14

Now right click over body and choose “Knife” tool, then choose the “loop” mode in the options tab.

Step 15

Here slice the bottom part of body twice as below.

Step 16

Press “U” on your keyboard then “L” to activate the “Loop selection” tool. and select the middle line, then squeeze it with “scale tool”.

Step 17

Now copy and resize the main part of the arm to use as leg. Here is the wireframe view.

Step 18

Create a new cube object as head (260×295x490)

Step 19

Make that cube editable (C) then select the face bottom of the cube and with “Extrude inner” tool create a new face (8cm offset).

Step 20

Now extrude it to inside.

Step 21

Select knife tool and change mode section to “loop” to make slices on corners. Do this for every corners which exist on top side. Every corner should look like below.

Step 22

Now create a “HyperNURBS” and make the cube object child of it. Then under the settings of hypernurbs give “3″ as value to “Subdivision editor” section.

Step 23

Create two cylinder and a triangle geometry like below to use on face.

Step 24

Now create a “Boole”object then drug these geometries and the cube object, which we created as cube and make child of the hypernurbs, but be sure that cube object comes first and other geometries stay together in a group file. Objects tree should looks like below.

Step 25

Copy these geometries and paste them same place but this time they should be thinner.

Continue to next page below!

Step 1

Like previously you can use your favourite 3D application for this tutorial. I’m using 3ds Max. Create a cube in the middle of the scene. My has 400mm x 400mm x 400mm.

Step 2

Duplicate the cube by holding Shift key and using ‘Select and Move’ tool. Place it like me. Make sure their edges are overlapping like on the image below (they should be in the same place).

Step 3

Duplicate your cube several times until you get something like on the image below. I just kept copying the cubes like in the second step and then duplicated entire row of them, moved it up, duplicated it again and so on.

Step 4

Establish your view like me and create a new camera (Ctrl/CMD + C). Switch it to ‘Ortographic Projection’. It’s necessary in order to make appropriate edges parallel. Otherwise we wouldn’t get this kind of effect.

Step 5

Render your scene with some basic rendering engine. You shouldn’t use GI here because you don’t want to have differentiated shades and shadows everywhere. Look at image below and you’ll notice that appropriate sides of each cube have the same color.

Step 6

There are also two bipeds. The one to the left is actually standing on the box. The second one was placed in the air and rotated a bit so that it makes an illusion he’s standing on a upside down box.

Conclusion

Again, here’s the final pattern. In the end I’d like to show you one interesting things about it. This pattern really consist of small hexagons. It could be splitted into lots of triangles as well that are identical and that’s why we don’t really know how to look at it. It’s two dimensional and each of these little triangles has just a different color which makes an illusion. I hope you enjoyed my tutorial. Thanks for reading!

Optical Illusions

Here are some examples of optical illusions. We’re going to create all of them. To begin with I’d like to tell you that it’s impossible to create an impossible object using 3D application (well, unless you’re working using real world settings and real perspectives, otherwise you can create anything). They doesn’t exist in real world, too. You can only fake the perspective and create a 2D illusion of a three-dimensional object. So, let’s see how it’s done on a few examples.

Step 1 – First Impossible Object

You can use your favourite 3D application for this tutorial. I believe that all of them will work well here. I used 3ds Max. First, create a three long boxes. Each one should have 1000×200mm. Place them like on the image below.

Step 2

Move your view like me and create a camera (Ctrl/CMD + C).

Step 3

Select your newly created camera and go to its settings. We have to turn on ‘Orthographic Projection’. Original perspective won’t work because it’s close to real one. It’s just hard to create an impossible object using standard perspective. Of course, it’s possible to use it but it would require cubes in different sizes and different distances between them. It’s much easier to use orthographic projection.

Step 4

Select the target of your camera and change your view to Camera01 (press C on your keyboard). Now you’ll have to move your target very precisely until you get something like on the image below.

Step 5 – Impossible Object Render

Render your scene twice. First with everything like on the first image above and then delete a part of the cuboid that’s the closest to the camera (see the second image). Afterwards move both your renders to the Photoshop. Put each render and alpha map on top of each other and use an inverted alpha map (image below shows normal alpha map) to get rid of a part of SECOND render. Once you do it you’re done with this object!

Step 5 – Second Impossible Object

It works pretty much the same for the second optical illusion. It only seems that this one is a bit more complicated but in fact it’s not. The boxes are cubes with 200mm edge. Gaps in between them have 100mm. Once you create them establish your camera like me. Follow the previous step to render it and then create an illusion from two renders.

Step 6 – Third Impossible Object

This one is the most advanced although it works almost the same way with this exception that here you’ll have to use less stairs on two sides. If you used the same number everywhere you would have to place your camera over everything and that won’t create this kind of effect. Each stair has 300mm x 300mm x 50mm. This time you won’t have to render it twice.

Conclusion

Good luck with creating your own impossible shapes. Here are some other examples taken from Technion website. Can you recreate them?

And again here are my examples:

Final Image Preview

Halloween Card Tutorial

Open up the Photoshop. Create a new document that has 1000×707px. I chose these values because the standard A4 sheet of paper has the same ratio (210×297mm). I have just decreased the height and width to 707px and 1000px and then rotated entire canvas by 90 degrees to make it horizontal.

Step 2

Go to ‘View -> New Guide…’ and create a new vertical guideline in the middle of the image (type in 50% and hit ‘OK’). We’ll create front side of the card on one half and the back side on the other half. It doesn’t matter which half will you choose for each side because you can easily swap them later and print as you like.

Step 3

Before creating anything 3D let’s just draw everything that we’ll need later. I’m talking here about a shape that will be used to create pumpkin’s face. It’s quite simple. Just grab you pen tool and draw some scary face. Then click right mouse button and choose ‘Make Selection…’. Afterwards create a new layer and fill the selection with black. Save your face as an separate *.jpg file.

Step 4

Open up the Adobe Illustrator and paste there the image you’ve just created. Go to ‘Object -> Live Trace -> Tracing Options…’ and hit ‘Trace’. Once you do it your drawing will become a vector shape. Save it as *.ai file (choose the oldest version of an Illustrator because 3ds Max usually has some problems with the newer ones).

Step 5

Open up 3ds Max. Go to ‘File -> Import…’ and import your vector shape from the previous step. Delete everything that you don’t need (borders for instance) and extrude your shape by choosing ‘Extrude’ from the modifiers list.

Step 6

Now it’s time for a pumpkin. It’s a very simple model so I’m not going to post here detailed step-by-step instructions on how to create it. Just use a sphere with 64 segments, flatten it a bit and use ‘Edit Poly’ modifier (select some edges around to scale them inwards) with ‘Scale Tool’ to make it look like a pumpkin. The upper part of the pumpkin can be created using ‘Extrude’ and some basic tools like ‘Move Tool’, ‘Rotate Tool’ and ‘Scale Tool’. Add it a couple of modifiers like on the image below to make it differentiated. Once you have your pumpkin done scale it down to 97% holding shift key and go to ‘Create panel -> Compound Objects -> Boolean’ to cut it out of the bigger pumpkin.

Step 7

Hit ‘M’ and choose the first material slot. Now follow the screenshots below to create two materials. Don’t forget to assign it to your pumpkin. Also, remember that you have to give apropriate polygons material IDs in order to use Multi/Sub-Object.

Step 8

Place your extruded face shape as I did inside of the pumpkin. Go to ‘Create panel -> Compound Objects -> Boolean’ again with pumpkin selected and choose your extruded shape to cut out the hole. You should now have

Step 9

Once you have your pumpkin completed create a ground plane and a wall behind it. For lighting create a spot light above the pumpkin and turn its shadows on (I suggest to use VRayShadow). Also, put one omni light inside of the pumpkin. Use VRay as your rendering engine. I turned global illumination on as well as environments. You may also try to render it using HDRIs.

Step 10

Paste the render into the Photoshop. It’s a bit empty around so I suggest to use a paper texture for the background. I’ve downloaded mine here: http://www.bittbox.com/freebies/free-high-res-grungy-paper-textures. Paste it into the Photoshop and desature it as well as make it darker by going to ‘Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast…’. Now place it on top of your render but you’ll have to use an alpha map for you pumpkin in order to cut it out and paste it on top of your previous render and the paper texture. This way the texture will make entire scene more diversified except disturbing the pumpkin.

Step 11

Once you’ve done it all it’s time for details. Create a huge circle using ‘Elipse Tool (U)’. Open up layer styles and turn on ‘Outer Glow’. Give it a fairly high size and a white color.

Step 12

Create a new layer and draw lots of small white dots on it. Go to ‘Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur’ and blur it with angle set to around 78 degrees and distance to 999 pixels. These dots are going to simulate volumetric lights. I’ve also added a text sating ‘Have a Scary Halloween’ at this point.

Final Touches

Finally, I’ve added some spider webs. I found that free vector shape on the Internet.

Conclusion

That is all for now. I hope you like it. Happy Halloween!

Final Result Preview

This is one of many possible versions of the image that we’ll be creating.

Step 1

Open up 3ds Max and go to Create Panel -> Splines. Create some kind of a text in the front viewport. Decrease the Leading and increase kerning a bit.

Step 2

Duplicate your text and set it to renderable spline. Add an extrude modifier to the first spline and set the amount to something not really high. Go back to the second spline and use the scale tool to scale it in Y axis to make it deeper.

Step 3

Create some kind of a box in the background and apply it a pure white color. Also, apply a pure white color to the front part of the letters.

Step 4

Use the following setting to create some simple glossy material for the letters’ borders.

Step 5

These are the settings I used for lighting. You can use almost any HDR image to create some environment because you will most likely end up with something interesting. I chose the first one I had on my HDD . You can also decrease noise treashold under settings tab. And don’t forget to turn off default lights!

Step 6

Render your scene with resolution set to 1280×800. Try different HDRIs to see what works best for you. Obviously you can render your scene differently. Feel free to create your own amazing composition here and maybe use a different perspective!

Step 7

Once you’ve done all that open up Adobe Photoshop and create a 1280×800px document. Paste your renders with alpha maps into it.

Step 8

Now there’s important part. We have to create some nice looking background. You can try to create something on your own or you can follow the next steps to create background similar to mine. First of all I used circle pattern available on http://pattern8.com/free-repeat-patterns/mono-circles-2. Simply paste it into the Photoshop and go to Edit -> Define Pattern… to create a new pattern. Then create a new layer and fill it with black. Once you’ve done that go to Layer Styles and use Pattern Overlay with your newly created pattern. Also, decrease an Opacity of this layer to around 35% and Fill Opacity to 0%.

Step 9

Paint some lighter and darker dots on a new layer with soft big brush. Lastly desaturate them.

Step 10

Create a new layer and again use your brush tool to paint some splatters in the background. You will have to cut out your text and move it on top of everything in order to paint some splatters beneath them. Render Alpha Mask with text and use it to cut out your letters. Splatters can be done by brushes available on the Internet. Truly, I don’t know what brushes have I used there but I’m sure they are free. Try to look for some similar ones. After you paint some splatters decrease Opacity of the layer a bit.

Step 11

Finally, we can paint some lines in the background. My ones were made in Adobe Illustrator. Simply draw two curves using Pen Tool and use Blend Tool to create some more lines in between. If you need more steps simply go to Object -> Blend -> Blend options… and change Specified Steps to something like 16. You can leave background color set to white (like I did) or set it to transparent. Paste your vectors to the Photoshop and place them in the background as I did (see the final image).

Conclusion

This is the end of this simple tutorial. Try to use the techniques you’ve just learned here to create your own cool compositions . I hope you liked it! The next tutorial is coming in the next few days so stay tuned!

IMPORTANT! This is a continuation of the previous part of this tutorial. If you haven’t read the previous part yet please visit Create an Awesome 3D Future City – Day 1 in order to complete it.

3D Future City

Again, that is what we are going to create.

City Composition

In the first part you’ve created all the necessary models so let’s arrange a city from them now. If you haven’t moved anything you should now have a cylinder with buildings placed at the position [0,0,0] and some little buildings that haven’t been placed anywhere yet. Place them as you like on top of the cylinder (see the final image). This is going to be our main city segment but we will also need a second less detailed part in the background. This is how it will look like.

Background City

Create a plane that is 150 meters wide and 150 meters long. Use 24 for width and lenght segments and move it to the position like [-34.7m, 37.9m, 3.7m](that’s how I placed it). Basically we need to create some buildings there. You can follow along the first part of this tutorial and use Piotr’s techniques to create some random buildings or you can just apply a greeble modifier to the plane. The background city won’t be visible as clearly so nobody will notice what it is really made of (unless you are planning high resolution renders). I applied a Greeble twice to the entire plane. First Greeble makes some space between polygons (I set taper fairly high) and the second one creates a little buildings. Hide the plane for now.

Camera Placement

Create a standard camera and use the following settings:

• Lens: 43.455841mm
• FOV: 45.0 degrees
• X=15.472652m, Y=-73.240763m, Z=24.403214m
• Roll: 0.0
• Target placement is [-1.814419m, -1.235621m, 18.575125m]
• Target distance should be 74.280222m afterwards
• Go to render options and change the output size settings to: width=1280, Height=1500.

This is how I placed my camera. These are random settings. I just moved the camera around and finally placed it like this because I tried to capture most of the buildings located on the cylinder and I left some space for the sky above everything. If you are creating different city feel free to place your camera as you like. We’ll do here a region render later.

Future City Materials

Press “M” on your keyboard to open up a material editor. Create a new VrayMtl, change its Reflect color from black to dark grey. Now follow the screenshot below to set up the maps like I did. Also, put a VrayHDRI in the Environment slot. You can use here whatever HDR image you want but I guess the industrial one will be the best choice. This will be highly reflective texture to use on all the buildings and tectum.

Sci-fi Textures

You can use textures that I created.

Other Materials

Clone the previous material. We have to change some settings in order to create something less reflective for the streets and pipes.

Mapping

Now we need to modify UV mapping. All you need to do is to add an UVW Mapping modifier to every object on the scene. Change mapping mode to Face. After that you can assign materials to objects.

Lights

At this point add any missing elements to the scene to make it look like on the image below. I’ve used VRay lights everywhere and they basically are placed like on the image below. Try to play with different setting here and make some test renders to see how will it look like when you move them around. I’m leaving it up to you because most likely your placement will be good for further playing with it.

Matte Painting

Finally, that’s how your render should look like in Adobe Photoshop (don’t forget to save its alpha channel as a separate image). Mask the edges and the bottom part because we won’t need them.

City Extension

Hide the main cylinder and unhide the plane with the background city. Render it. After that paste it into the Photoshop and use your cylinder’s Alpha mask to get rid of the part of the background city in front of the camera.

City Extension Adjustments

We don’t have an infinite city so it’s good to add some fog to hide this fact. Use Gradient tool to achieve it and set the layer’s blending mode to Screen.

Background Buildings

Draw some skyscrapers there where your horizon is and copy them a few times. You don’t have to create anything detailed but better don’t follow mine. Think of something that looks more like a buildings instead .

Sky

To add a sky simply take a photo of one, render it or use a sky texture from the internet. I used one of the skies available on cgtextures.com. Paste it to your document and resize it if necessary. To fix the rest of the image paint something like on the images below on two different layers with brush. Set first layer to Overlay and the second to Multiply.

Final Touches

Add two Brightness/Contrast Adjustment layers with the following settings.

Conclusion

That is all for now! If you liked it please Stumble or Digg it! The next tutorials are coming in the next few days so subscribe to our RSS feed and don’t miss them!

Future City

That’s what we are going to create. I made this image with Paul but he’s mostly responsible for post-processing part. The subject of this tutorial was suggested by a founder of the presidiacreative.com blog – Eric. Thank you for a great idea!

Important Notes

In order to create this scene you will need a really good computer. There will be millions of polygons and dozens of lights to render. I’m using 4-core Intel processor with 4GB of RAM and my 3DS Max crashed several times before I made the entire scene and managed to render it. Make sure that you save your work often! Also, to avoid lags and freezes inside of 3DS Max I suggest to hide all the objects that are temporarly unused. You may also split whole scene into smaller parts and work with different parts separatly. We will use metric units at first and then we will swap back to generic.

Modeling the City Basemesh

Use top view to create a cylinder that has radius set to 40m, height set to 4m, Cap Segments to 16 and Sides to 64. Right-click on a move tool (1) and move your  cylinder at [0,0,0](2). This is a base of our city. We will add some more buildings and details to it.

Hide the cylinder and create a sphere. Place it in the middle of the scene. That’s going to be the main “tectum building”.

Now try to add some details. I used extrude and bevel tools to add some boxes around. Afterwards I scaled it a bit .

Unhide all. Your tectum should fit perfectly into the scene.

Now, let us start working with the cylinder. Select it (you may hide sphere for a better visibility) and convert it to editable poly. Add an extra edge as in the image below.

After that switch to polygon sub-level of an Editable Poly and start to work on topology of the virtual city. Select all the top polygons and deselect area that will be your street. This way you should now have the polygons that you want tobe your buildings selected.

Extrude selected polygons just a little bit.

Unhide all the objects again and deselect polygons in the middle of your cylinder (we don’t need them because they won’t be visible anyway).

Future Buildings

It is time to swap back to generic units setup as I mentioned earlier. Go to Customize -> Units setup and swap them to generic. We will now use a Greeble plug-in for 3DS Max. It is not necessary but this will make your work faster. This plug-in allows you to create some random polygons so it’s perfect for little details but don’t use everywhere because you will change your work into something monotonous. Here’s a little more information about Greeble from Wikipedia:

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects. They serve no real purpose other than to add complexity to the object, and cause the flow of the eye over the surface of the object to be interrupted, usually giving the impression of increased size.

Modeling the Future Buildings

Add a Greeble modifier to selected faces (it is very important to have them really selected while applying a Greeble!). At first, it will help us with constructing buildings and then we will use it to add some more small details.

To begin with, the only thing we need is the bottom part of each building. Use the values shown on the image below for Min/Max height and taper and deselect Generate widgets checkbox. Also, turn on Select Tops option.

Add an Edit Poly modifier to the cylinder. Go to the Polygon sub-level and use Inset button (make sure you have all the tops of the building selected). Change inset Amount to 2.0 .

Deselect all the faces. Go to Polygon: Smoothing Groups rollout and click the Select By SG button. Highlight all the numbers (there should be five) and click OK.

Lots of faces should become selected now but we need even more.

Go to the left viewport and select all the polygons like on the image below.

Go to Edit->Select invert or just press Ctr+I on your keyboard to select inverse. The edges of your buildings should become selected now.

Add them a smoothing group (like 32). This will help you in the further steps.

Now it’s time to add some little details on the roofs. Click on the Select by SG under Polygon: Smoothing Groups rollout, pick number five and click OK. Only the middle faces on your roof should become selected now. While they are slected, add a Greeble modifier. For the setting use something similar to these below.

Add a new Edit Poly modifier. Turn on Polygon sub-level and click Select by SG button. This time pick a number 32. We are going to make rails on top of all the buildings.

Add a new Greeble modifier and use the settings presented on the image below (or just pick your own at this point).

Using the techniques from the previous steps I added some details to the ring outside the tectum building.

Future City Streets

Now let’s focus on the “streets”. You can convert your city to an Editable Poly or just add another Edit Poly modifier, select all your streets and detach them. Hide everything but the street. Select all the polygons on the streets like on the image below and inset them. After that extrude them with negative value. Having faces still selected add Greeble modifier (just some mode details).

I made an aerial on top of the main building. Then I created two pipes using torus. Finally, I added some really simple models visible on the screenshots below and copied everything eight times around using Array tool (Tools->Array).

Detail close-up. As you can see I made this bracket and copied it a few times. Also, I added some Sphere VrayLights with little radius and Intensity to 2.0. At the end I created bigger VrayLight Plane.

This is how it looks after I copied it eight times around.

I also made a few extra, bigger and unique buildings and added them to the scene. Use your imagination to create something interesting !

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve just made all the necessary obejcts and accomplished this part of the tutorial. The second part will explain you how to set up your materials, lights and post-process entire scene in Adobe Photoshop: Create an Awesome 3D Future City – Day 2.Subscribe to our RSS feed and don’t miss another great tutorials!

3D Diamond Ring

Here is an example image of 3D diamond ring. To create this ring we’re going to use four different elements and combine them together. Let’s start with the little diamonds.

Modeling 3D Diamonds

If you’d like to have accurate model of a diamond you have to check their ratios and shapes first. If you’d like to have just a diamond not knowing how does it look like you will end up with some unrealistic model. We are certainly going to use real ratios and we’ll create as realistic model as possible. I’ve made a quick sketch (don’t use it as a reference image because it’s not precise).

Modeling Diamond – Size

Let’s start with the NGon that has 16 sides. Go to Shapes -> Splines -> NGon and create one in the top view. Place it on position [0,0,0]. My one has a radius equal to 21.7. Once you have it we can calculate all the dimensions we need:

• 43.4 is 100%
• 43.1% of 43.4 is 18.7054
• 2.5% of 43.4 is 1.085
• 15.4% of 43.4 is 6.6836
• 53% of 43.4 is 23.002

Modeling Diamond – Creating the Shapes

Once we have all these dimensions we can create a diamond. If you’d like it to be perfect just use the numbers above but you can also round them and make it almost perfect which doesn’t matter for simple scenes like this one. It would probably make a difference if you were working on some real ring project that requires high precision but I think 3ds Max it’s not software created for designing professional rings.

Modeling Diamond – Extruding Your Shapes

Let’s extrude your NGon with amount set to 18.7054 and add a modifier called Edit Poly to your object.

After that go to Vertex sub-level and scale all the top vertices like on the image below.

When they are close enough you can use Weld Tool to weld them together.

The next step is to rotate entire object upside down and extrude top polygon that will be our gridle. Use 1.085 as the extrudion amount value.

Afterwards extrude it again using 6.6836 for the extrudion value and select all the top vertices again. Scale them down to 57%.

Ideal Cut

Once we have right dimensions it’s time to virtually cut it. It’s the hardest part because standard diamond shapes aren’t just made of a series of standard lines. To make it correct just follow the screenshots and instructions below.

1. First make sure you are using Cut Tool. This will allow you to create some more edges on top of the diamond.
2. Then go to a Top viewport
3. We have to start with the center part and create there two squares
4. The next step is to connect some vertices with the gridle. Make sure you are starting with the farthest vertex that is a part of one of the squares!
5. Select all the polygons around that are making specific shape presented on the fourth image and hit delete to get rid of them
6. Use cap to fill the holes
7. Lastly select all the vertices you’ve previously connected with the gridle and move them down in Front viewport. The value of this offset is hard to calculate but it’s around 1.2 Max’s units I guess
8. There are also some missing edges at the bottom of the diamond so you can simply use Cut Tool to create them.

Modeling a Ring

Modeling a ring is quite an easy task. Inner diameter usually varies from around 11mm to 25mm so let’s create a circle that has 10mm radius (20mm diameter). After that duplicate your circle and convert it to Editable Spline. Go to Vertex sub-level of Editable Spline and drag one of the vertices up. Most of the rings has a similar shape so it’s good to draw something like this to have an outline of how it is going to look like. Afterwards delete one segment of your circle.

Lofting

Then create a little NGon with 5 sides and a rectangle with rounded edges. Move one of the NGon’s vertices farther than the others.

Select the circle you’ve created in the previous step. Go to the Compound Objects -> Loft and pick a NGon as a shape.

1. Change the Path value to 30 and pick rectangle as a shape.
2. Change the Path number to 70 and pick the rectangle again.
3. At the end change the Path to 100 and pick NGon as a shape.

Try to adjust your ring’s shape according to the outline from the prevoius step. You can rotate and scale NGon and rectangle by going to the Loft’s sub-level called Shape.

Placing Diamonds

Now it’s time for the top part of our ring. You can place there all the diamonds and other things as you like. I’m not able to depict everything because it would be boring so here is a little preview of what it is made of. If you have any problems or questions regarding this step feel free to ask but I hope it’s clear enough how to create all the elements.

Materials

That’s very short and easy. Use VRayMtl for both materials.

• Diamond material – diffuse: black, reflect: white, refract: white, IOR: 2.47, refractions subdivs: a lot more (like 50).
• Gold material – diffuse: black, black, reflect: brown (rgb(187,164,70)), reflection glossiness: 0.8, refract: black, IOR: 0.23 or a little bit higher.

Scene

Create a plane and apply a pure white material to it. Create many omni light around but decrease their multipliers from 1.0 to 0.25. Place them randomly. You can add some random objects around (big objects or many smaller) and render your scene with the standard VRay settings and Global Illumination turned on. Use Irradiance Map + Light Cache for GI. You can also try to render it using HDRIs or you can use both lights and HDR image.

Conclusion

Again, this is what I got. I hope you enjoyed it. As usual the next tutorial is coming next week so don’t miss it!