Blender - a gyroscope

I read that Apple has a gyroscope inside their iPhones. Must be a lot more difficult than getting a ship inside a bottle :-O

Anyway, I made a gyroscope with Blender, and rendered it both with the internal renderer and with Cycles.
I couldn't get the same - or even a similar - result. One of the things I still struggle with is UV-mapping. Without cycles it's so easy to get the table right - choose the image you want, specify the number of times you want it to map (say 5x5), done.
With cycles I couldn't get it right... only a 1x1 mapping.

The main problem again is how to get decent lights. Without cycles, just play around with a few different lamps to get the emphasis on the object, and that's it. With cycles I have to use emitting surfaces or meshes, and I only get half-decent results, at least to my likings: the table looks nice, so does the curtain, but the object remains in the dark.

This is what I got so far:

Attachment 86175Attachment 86176

The one on the left is with Cycles.

both renders look good. I'm hoping to have some time very soon to experiment more with cycles but as for lighting add a couple of planes and give them an emisson material you can set the brightness of each light and make as many as you want.

Here is a BlenderCookie video that shows how to make lights invisible to the camera, so you can position them as close to the object as you need.

Thanks, Frances, I already had 4 emitting objects (3 planes and a cylinder) but getting them closer and making them invisible might help indeed. The other thing is that the scene looks brighter in preview than after the actual render.

Looks good guy.

Nice job on the gyroscope...

I had several as a child and there's something about gyroscopes that have a high nerd appeal. (ie. just right for ME)

Peace

James

There's an odd thing in Blender - to get the colours right in cycles, it turns out that you have to tick render => shader => color management with the Blender render active.
Then, switch to cycles and yes, the colours are much brighter...

Here's the result

Attachment 86436

I also animated the gyroscope, but a quick calculation told me that it would take (with Cycles) about 21 hours to render so I didn't...