Cheap watch

[Grafixman]

Kiwi's Photoimpact watch inspired this. I was going to see if I can do something similar in PI, but unfortunately, nothing seems to come out right. Finally decided to fire up Blender and rework some cylinders . Been adding bits and pieces during spare time ever since and it's about 90% complete now. Maybe some bump mapping for the border for stitching around the edges of the strap later? Blender internal renderer for now. Might be a good subject for Yafray rendering, but I really haven't played around with Yafray much. And the rendertime would be really long....

[Grafixman]

Update. Still Blender internal renderer, just a test render for the stitch bumpmap on the strap.

[Ballpoint]

Hey Grafixman, it may be a cheapwatch but the artwork is second to none (geddit ). Brilliant. Your topics for art are different everytime (time - Ithangyou) but always imaginative and excellent .

[gidgit]

LOL, that's funny BP

Hey GM, this is coming along very nicely eh? The stitch came out really nice, bang on dude

Keep up the good stuff and hard work eh It's inspirational to watch

[a4hire]

Looking Really good Grafixman. I wish I could do some stuff like that.

[Grafixman]

I must really be slowing down. Only upon reading Christopher's and Gidgit's replies twice did I finally catch the puns....
Lol. You guys have quick wits.
Bruce, this is really small stuff. I look at other people's work and realize it will probably take me a long time before I can do anything close.
You can probably top this with very little effort.
Aargh, Yafray is driving me nuts. The settings are drastically different and my bump map got inexplicably stretched. And the rendertimes!

[Grafixman]

Finally got a half-decent render with Yafray. Hdri background, etc... Took the better part of an hour. Twice, really, since the first try was completely messed up. Feels like baking a cake. Mixing in all the ingredients and still not sure how it will finally turn up.
Wouldn't need sharp eyes to notice that the little loop on the strap is colored differently. Forgot about that part. The metal part could also use a bit more tweaking, too. But I'm not sure I'm ready for another long wait for a pic...

[Soquili]

Hi GMan,

Nice looking watch! How did you create the bumpmap for the stitching?

[Grafixman]

I had to UVmap the strap first. After defining the seams for the cut, Blender has this lscm unwrap that usually gets the right configuration for the UV map. Then there are two options for exporting the uv map outline to your 2d app. One is via a script and another is just by simply doing a screencap of the zoomed in result. I used the screencap (print screen) button and pasted the pic in PI. Cropped and converted the pic to a layer, turned up the transparency a bit and filled the base canvas black. Then it was just laying out a white dashed line where the stitches should be, applying a bit of Gaussian blur to it, turning off the visibility of the reference layout and saving the pic as a tga file. The image is then used as a bump texture. The leather is a procedural texture.
One thing I noticed is that the Blender internal renderer and Yafray handles the material and lighting settings differently. So the values have to be readjusted for the Yafray render. Doing previews is the hard part. I had to set the render size very small and turn off the anti-aliasing for the Yafray previews and it still took longer than Blender internal renderer.

[Mike Bailey]

Finally got a half-decent render with Yafray. Hdri background, etc... Took the better part of an hour.

Yep! I can sure see the difference.

I have done renders that took all night, I just go to bed and check it out in the morning.