Filter Forge - Brushed Stainless Steel by ronviers

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Qender

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Brushed Stainless Steel by ronviers
http://www.filterforge.com/filters/4662.html

Posted: November 5, 2007 5:12 am

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Qender

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Wow, this by far beats my brushed steel! This looks really lifelike. It doesn't do seamless tiling very well though, and it would be nice if I could change the size of the beveled area. Still really beautiful, congrats!

Posted: November 5, 2007 5:19 am

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ronviers

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Thanks Qender but your panel and tile filters are beautiful and have a much broader range of applications than this on. Because of the design approach I took this is very much a one trick pony. smile:)

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Qender wrote: It doesn't do seamless tiling very well though, and it would be nice if I could change the size of the beveled area.

As it stands it will probably never tile very well but I will see what I can do about a better bevel.

Thank you. smile:)

Posted: November 5, 2007 10:17 am

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Kraellin

Kraellin

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hmmm, i've seen this somewhere before smile;)

If wishes were horses... there'd be a whole lot of horse crap to clean up!

Craig

Posted: November 5, 2007 1:11 pm

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jffe

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I don't understand the bevel, why have a bevel exactly ?

jffe

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Posted: November 5, 2007 4:09 pm

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ronviers

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jffe wrote: i've seen this somewhere before

Hehe - even the same preset smile;)

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jffe wrote: why have a bevel

Well, the first one didn't have it - and it is optional. Originally it was called a seam.

Posted: November 5, 2007 4:15 pm

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jffe

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I take it part of the secret recipe is ProfGrads ? Cause if you could get the same look with Perlin Noise, then it would tile perfectly. I wonder why the ProfGrads work better in this case, or have we checke dinto that in other similar cases ?

jffe

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Posted: November 5, 2007 4:26 pm

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ronviers

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ronviers wrote: Originally it was called a seam.

To be more accurate I should have said 'at one point it was called a seam', this fitler has had a lot of iterations.

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jffe wrote: I wonder why the ProfGrads work better in this case

Do you mean for the bump map? Because of FF's design the multiplication of orthogonal gradients are how you achieve flatness in FF-land. smile:|

Posted: November 5, 2007 4:34 pm

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jffe

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ronviers wrote: orthogonal gradients

----Not sure what that term means. I substituted a Perlin Noise for the ProfGrads, did some blending, and got it seamless and faster, but it lost a LOT of the shine it had, basically, it lost it's look. I am not sure if a Threshold might help or hinder, maybe some High Pass, but I'm sure there is a way to get that much shine and not use any ProfGrads, then it would tile seamlessly. The "flatness" wasn't the problem I ran into, the mods I made started to kind of split up the lines, into more like beaded or dotted striations, and like I said, the really bright shine disappeared somewhere along the way too (although I think that had more to do with the blending I did to keep the brushed lines flat). Basically, this filter could be done with one Perlin Noise instead of all the ProfGrads, it would/will just take a day or three of exprimenting and learning how to keep the shine while keeping the lines flat. I'm probably not going to spend the time on it, but I did want to try and be helpful and let you know what I had done for starters, in case you want to pursue it. smile:)

jffe

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Posted: November 5, 2007 4:55 pm

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ronviers

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Thanks to Qender this filter now allows for a beveled mirror effect. smile8)

Posted: November 5, 2007 5:44 pm

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ronviers

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Among others

Posted: November 5, 2007 5:44 pm

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ronviers

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And by 'now' I mean tomorrow. smile:)

11-6-7

Posted: November 5, 2007 5:46 pm

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ronviers

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jffe - thanks for taking a look at it. I will try your suggestions and see what I can come up with.
By orthogonal gradients I mean gradients at right angles. If you think that's obscure here is how onyXMaster put it:

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onyXMaster wrote:
When you use environment mapping (Filter Forge lighting uses this technology as a part of Surface filters rendering), you get the reflection for _orientation_, since the lighting environment itself is positioned infinitely far from the surface itself. So, you will not get any variation of reflection on a flat surface (no matter at what angle it is). On the other hand, any distortion introduced to the surface will introduce the variations in reflection (place a sphere there to get what I'm talking about).

Posted: November 5, 2007 5:51 pm

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Carl

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Good one Ron smile:D

........Carl

Posted: November 5, 2007 10:16 pm

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ronviers

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The effectiveness of this filter can be extended by importing an appropriate image to provide lighting. For example, I renamed a 1200x600 version of this image from abSm.jpg to abSm.exr and used the FF Tools>HDRI Import menu option to add it to the environment ball library.

Posted: November 6, 2007 10:19 am

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ronviers

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Once the file was imported I used it to light this panel.

Posted: November 6, 2007 10:20 am

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ronviers

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Posted: November 6, 2007 10:21 am

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ronviers

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I did the same using this image.
Note; the image used for lighting needs to be twice as wide as it is tall and kept pretty small or it will take a while – the import process is very slow for larger files.
When used as a mirror it might be tricky to get the reflections to match perfectly but when used as metal then close might be good enough. smile:)

Posted: November 6, 2007 10:23 am

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ronviers

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Carl wrote: Good one Ron

Thank you Carl. smile:)

Posted: November 6, 2007 10:24 am

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Kraellin

Kraellin

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i think the recommended size from one of the FF team was stated to be 400 x 200. that's not a fixed number, but on a single core, 3 ghz machine, that size is going to take like 10 or 15 minutes. as your file size goes up, so will the rendering time to get your hdri lighting environment. i'm not sure if it's a geometric progression on time, but it wouldnt surprise me if it was. so, keep your .exr files small.

also, remember that the lighting environment 'sphere' only moves laterally, currently. so, if you use an image for the import that is something like a gradient, make sure the gradient is oriented to give you the full benefit of that gradient. and what i mean by that is, let's say you have an image that is a number of horizontal lines. if you use that for the import when you have it in place in the lighting enviroment and you move the sphere, you will have no variation in your environment as you move the sphere. but, if you rotated that image 90 degrees before import so that the horizontal lines are now vertical and imported it that way, when you move the sphere laterally, you would get a change because the vertical lines would now be changing in place, rotating as you rotated the sphere.

If wishes were horses... there'd be a whole lot of horse crap to clean up!

Craig

Posted: November 6, 2007 12:05 pm

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ronviers

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Kraellin wrote: keep your .exr files small.

That's good advice, I do not remember how long the 1200x600 image took to process but it was quite a while.
I was going to post the .ffenv files to the web for others to use but it turned out to be around 12MB so they're too big for my connection.

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Kraellin wrote: environment 'sphere' only moves laterally

Another good point. If I had been aware of that I would have flipped the angelballs image so the larger spheres were above the horizon. Still, it's not a bad example because some projects will need the light to be placed lower.
Angel balls make good skies. smile:D

Posted: November 6, 2007 12:36 pm

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Kraellin

Kraellin

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cool

well, i've started a thread in the general discussion forum for creating a library of .jpg's to use as .exr's. post whatever images you've used that follow the criteria laid out there into that thread and perhaps we can get a nice library going of good jpg's for lighting environments! smile:)

If wishes were horses... there'd be a whole lot of horse crap to clean up!

Craig

Posted: November 6, 2007 1:34 pm

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ronviers

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jffe wrote: Basically, this filter could be done with one Perlin Noise instead of all the ProfGrads, it would/will just take a day or three of exprimenting and learning how to keep the shine while keeping the lines flat.

I have been trying and for a while I thought I had it, but all I did was move the profile gradients to other locations. I will come back to it if I think of something else to try. smile:|

Posted: November 7, 2007 1:55 am

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Carl

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How did you manage to get the different pic into the presets smile:?: