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

[Gare]

If anyone would like to take a crack at an exceptionally weird floor pattern, this is all vector.

My Best,

Gary

[stygg2003]

Thanks for the feedback Gary and all the measures I need to do to make the image less clinical, I agree it looks more realistic with the changes and thanks for the files, will implement them into my drawing, also the extra information on layout of this type of image, much appreciated.

Stygg

[stygg2003]

Reduced the size of the 6ft sphere, which reminded me of the giant glass Egg did a while ago and used the Xara Offices in England as the background. Anyway shrunk it down and implemented the changes Gary had shown and I think it looks better for it

Stygg

[Gare]

I think that looks great, stygg, and I recommend you put it in your gallery!

My Best,

Gary

P.S. I know that the Xara Group offices have a snooker table. Details, details...

[csehz]

Gare thanks for that vector pattern, it reminds me to the camouflage pattern which Bob showed once on XaraXone.

Stygg you are so diligant I always admire that, sorry just for one comment as tried to count the dalmatians in your room and realized that if there are 7 spots in one line then how the reflections have 12 But if it is abstract then okay and sure somehow the 101 come out once

[stygg2003]

Your absolutely right Csehz I never noticed I had 12, not so diligent after all! I was to busy trying to get the mold into the sphere but I'll settle for what you say, it's abstract, well that's my excuse!

Stygg

[Gare]

Ignore Csehz, stygg!

If you're short a few dots, I can help, here:



@Csehz: Ignore stygg. There, you're all set.

Seriously: that pattern you think looks like camouflage was originally a bitmap that did not seamlessly tile. I sort of fixed it in Photoshop, but some of the edges became unacceptably blurry. So I went through all this to bring you the silly pattern:

I used the Threshold command To make the thing black or white.

I used Vector Magic to auto-trace the result. Which took several tries because any Threshold command is going to produce aliasing which any auto-tracer interprets as unwanted jaggy lines.

I imported it as a PDF to Xara where I manually did a few things. you'll see that this is a Clip Shape, hiding areas of the smaller pieces that didn't perfectly align to the edges.

Ah, it's all a labor of love.

My Best,

Gary

[stygg2003]

@ Csehz, since you pointed out there was 12 shapes in the sphere mold and seven in the box floor its been driving me mad so I've altered it and now there are seven, but this time after making the sphere floor mold I made a bit map copy of it, made a mask and blurred the two top rows then clip viewed the lot and gave it a little more blur plus the trans. ellipse on top Gary suggested to make it less 2D. I've not got round to doing the pie chart yet so think I'll attempt that next and then back to a black sphere and shadow Gary posted a while back, it's really good so will attempt that. Your never stuck for work in the Xone

Stygg

[stygg2003]

Sorry guys meant to post this in #39, I think the sphere looks better off centre, less clinical.

Apologies Stygg