Depth-of-Field and Full board Chessboard Render

Here are my renders of the

chessboard.

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Material and texture and models are excellent!
But I miss some contact shadows and reflections on the board for the foreground pieces, on the white fields. Maybe you could fix that?

Your Knight model is very beautiful. Would like to know how you did that.

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Agree with FedPete! Job well done. Seems that the Maya experience is paying off in Blender :slight_smile:

Thank you, both. I looked over the scene and saw that the Metallic texture I was using set that level very high so the shadows were completely swallowed up. So I removed that texture and adjusted the metallic slider. Also, I’m using rather large area lights to create soft shadows in general, those together with the metallic setting completely obliterated the shadows. I also noticed texture stretching on the chessboard and fixed that as well. Still need to better learn Blender’s UV mapping toolset, though.

Regarding the Knight, I used the box modeling techniques we’ve already learned throughout the course. I started with an image of the knight I found online, made a cube and kept extruding the cube on the Z axis to create the basic profile shape of the neck and head. I then used an edge loop and deleted one side of the faces so I could work on only one side and mirror it later. I went rogue on this assignment and didn’t watch the lessons after the initial few, so there were techniques I could have used to make the process quicker that I didn’t know about :stuck_out_tongue: (I watched the full section lessons afterwards). I wanted to see if I could use Blender as I did Maya in the past and just explored the interface looking for tools. For the head, I primarily used edge loops and the knife tool to cut what I needed along with inset and extrude. I worked a bit messily, not caring if I had triangles and ngons, and then, once I had the basic face I wanted, I re-topologized (deleted and added new edges to create more quads and break up ngons and tris). It’s not perfect and there are many areas that can be cleaned up further, but I’m happy with it overall.

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Very nice set and scene.

The different texture effect on the ‘heads’ is very effective. Just puzzling. The grain most obvious on the close up of the bishop and Queen is diagonal. Differing in direction to the main body. Usually, they would be one bit of wood but I guess they could be separately turned and stacked components.

Is the different effect metalising a wood texture?
Lots of scratches on the board, been through a rough life! Though I see similar scaled down on the king, last image. Is all the wood using the one texture which you have colour adjusted for different parts?

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You are correct. Both the scratched metal and the wood textures are identical except for a color and brightness shift. I wanted the pieces to look like they were older and I did want the pieces to look like they were made of a similar material to the chessboard itself. Of course, I don’t quite have the knowledge of UV unwrapping in Blender so there is quite a bit of stretching and sometimes the grain isn’t going the right direction. I have started playing more with Blender’s UV unwrapping and have attached a few tweaks. I can still see stretching on the rook and a seam on the knight and bishop, but, overall, the textures look better now. If I was to finish these completely, I’d bring them into Substance Painter and age them up properly :).

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Thank you for explaining this for the viewers. Most of us have a lot of trouble creating the Knight.
It is nice to see the quality of the model with simple tools we all know.
Your project stands out from the rest!
It can be intimidating for some of us, seeing the high quality you’ve achieved.

Thank you!

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This looks incredible! thanks for your explanations, I am about to get to that section and it really helps. the realism in this model is so good! great job!

Thank you, Jonathan! The techniques for creating low poly models are the same for high poly (just takes a bit more time :yum:). I don’t know your familiarity with 3D modeling, in general. Go for what you are comfortable with. I look forward to seeing what you create!

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I saw a comment you made on one of my posts about a month ago and I have been looking at your posts, and I must ask, do you have some background knowledge of 3d graphics before you started this? I am brand new, and I must say that your renders so far have been utterly incredible. So I was just curious if you had some prior experience with this stuff.

*edit: on second thought this is a bit of a dumb questions because the answer is almost definitely yes, so perhaps a better way of asking would be how much experience, lol

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I came from a game development background. I started a game company many years ago with some friends of mine. At the time, I didn’t really do modeling - I was in charge of concepting, texturing, lighting models for the Unity game engine. I also did UI for some of our games. Sometimes we’d get a model from an artist and it just didn’t quite look like the concept art, so I would take the model and start messing with it in Maya to try and make it look more like the original concept. Because I would mess with the models from our games, I often broke the rigs, so I had to figure out rigging in Maya as well. That’s how I started to learn Maya. To better improve, I took a Maya course at my college (although, at that point, it acted more as a confirmation that I was doing things correctly) and I have gone through a few Maya Udemy courses. Unfortunately, I no longer work at the game company (I left a number of years ago) and I don’t have a student license to Maya, so I’m now learning Blender.

I appreciate the comments. I still have a long way to go. The models aren’t as good as you think - I cheat by making the materials look cool to hide my model’s shortcomings :smiley:

TL;DR - I learned Maya when I was working on games with friends and improved by taking a course in college and through Udemy. Now using Blender because I don’t have a Maya license.

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that looks really good!

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I love the textures and the look of your board and chess pieces! The Knight and it’s mane and that expression it has is great :slight_smile:

As a college student I have Maya 2015 but barely did anything in it. I’m enjoying Blender greatly as a brand new modeler.

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