January 2014 Video Tutorial : Drawing Plastic and Chrome What's the Diff?

[Gare]

@ stygg— I almost can't think of anything I've talked about up to now that you missed, stygg. This is a dramatic improvement in concept and technique, and I knew you could do it if you just got a gentle nudge in the right general direction.

By the way, the floor looks like fun; more like a black and white version of the game "Twister" than Dalmatian!

Here's a visual suggestion, attached in XAR format, too: When light reflects, even from a highly "focused" surface, there's a law of diminishing returns going on because the atmosphere absorbs and slows down the reflected light. So even a mirror-like chrome sphere would be slightly duller than the origin of its reflections.

Another thing (sorry!) is that almost nothing in the real word is perfect. Therefore, a nearly perfect 6 foot tall chrome sphere in a room (!) would exhibit just a little ambient and/or diffuse lighting, in addition to the massive amount of specular lighting. So I gently shaded your work to make the sphere more sphere-like and less 2D, which is a natural occurrence when something is highly reflective in a somewhat sterile atmosphere.



Oh, and as long as this might be my only post today (cheering heard throughout TalkGraphics), I might as well go for broke here: because spheres distort as a mathematical power function, the progression of a "regular" pattern on the floor will not travel linearly across the reflective surface. In PlainSpeak, the dots on the floor will be distorted somewhat like this image here, and they also will be distorted on the floor, they will not progress in an even fashion because you're looking into the room at an angle, producing a "vanishing point" for the pattern. The images probably will make more sense than my writing here. On sphere is mirror-like and then I did a slightly rough version just to show everyone an option: to slightly blur the interior of your drawing to simulate sand-blasted chrome or whatever.



I tend to make this sort of scene deliberately asymmetrical, so the ball is a little to the left, because with a white room and a highly reflective ball, the scene just looks too perfect as a symmetrical composition, thus phoney and uninteresting.

Here's an answer to an un-asked question this month: why did Gary begin us all with reflective spheres?

A: two reasons. 1.) reflections are phenomenally complex and the simplest form to replicate is a sphere because it is predictable in its reflections. A cylinder less so, and a reflective textured surface...good luck!

2.) "Straight" mirror-like surfaces—planar ones—are visually boring because essentially they are a mirror. Additionally, planar reflective surfaces place a lot of limits on what is reflected to give the character to the object. A sphere distorts the surroundings, making reflected objects look bigger and smaller, and spheroids are just inherently visually interesting when they reflect their surroundings.

I did a brief animation on my YouTube channel, which I'd originally done for this month but ran out of time (no kidding, Sherlock!). Notice how boring the planar surface of the guy's body is, compared to the right detail in the spherical head.



Thanks for your work, stygg! You are a terrific student for an appreciative teacher!

My Best,

Gary