Checkmate

[lovingsaskia]

Working on a mechanical chess set, utilising different nuts and bolts as the pieces. Just got the king piece to sort out and then start to work on better materials and try and pick out the reflections of the glass and cog pieces embedded in them.
Once I've finished the pieces I'm intending to set the board up mid game and try and get some feel to the scene.
C&C's welcome.

[an1m3-lov3r]

wow pretty cool. like how you use different pieces. that makes the chess set more interesting. what program did you use? 3Ds Max, Maya, Etc...

[lovingsaskia]

Thanks modelled in Max 2011. Finished building the last piece and rebuilt the cogs embeded in the board. Next step will be to go back over the individual pieces and refine the threads, general cleanup. Once that it done I'm going to work on the materials using mental ray and set up the board mid play. Then its on to render and post work.

[McFly]

Interesting idea. Board (materials in general in fact) is too reflexive, pieces reflection makes it hard to tell what's what.

[lovingsaskia]

Yeah I agree, that's going to be my next task, cleaned up the individual pieces for now and trying to think of suitable materials for them, as you say though I'm going to have to try and find some sort of balance with reflectivity.

[McFly]

Much better render! Pieces are still too reflexive, their rounded top look kinda semi transparent.

Maybe the photo below can help you:

[lovingsaskia]

Thanks, I've started work on the materials now and I think possibly closer to the look I'm after. However at the moment I'm using the daylight system within mental ray to light the scene at the moment, now I'm a little unsure on this. Is using the daylight system a bit of a kop out?

[McFly]

Much better material. I suck at lighting so I usually just throw in a SkyLight+LightTracer and sometimes an additional spot or direct light.

[lovingsaskia]

Thanks, finally starting to get there, I think. Instead of doing everything in one single render I'm separating elements and then comping it all together in photoshop. Need to do some reading up on photoshop though as I'm extremely rusty. I haven't touched the board yet as I'm still not 100% with it. Board is the major headache I believe as the glass pretty much reflects the sky material and I lose the white and black checkers. Hdr in the current board image will be removed by my next render.

Having said that, there is too much blue, next thing on the list.

[Lord_doin]

way better looking, love the chess game, if it were real, I'd definitely consider buying(depending on finances). great work

[lovingsaskia]

Cheers, carrying on with working on the materials.