Gold

[loonytoonx]

Greetings to all, I have a question about modeling and rendering a mountain into gold. I have the mountain created with a very good texture, but now I need to be able to cap the mountain with a gold texture or model. I have tried a few different methods (sprites, particles, cloth, volume shaders, etc) but nothing has seemed to be what the client wants. It needs to a hard substance (non-flowing) and it also needs to have the luster, shine, and glint of gold. I have created a decent gold texture in Photoshop, but it renders too flat in Maya. I also have yet to try morphing the top of the mountain, but was hoping someone may have a simpler suggestion.

Any help is most appreciated

[brandeil]

The part that turns into gold, have u seperated that from the geometry of the rest of the mountain to make it easir? Might be helpfull to post a sample, rendering gold is usualy very simple.
:)

[loonytoonx]

I think I may have solved the problem last night. I duplicated the mountain and then cut off the bottom so only the top remained, then scaled it up some. I then found a good gold shader and and adjusted the specularity and reflectivness and also added a slight bump map and it renders out very nicely now. I am waiting to see what the client thinks and I still may need to add some glint and see if I can make the light bounce off the gold some, to give a little more realistic look to it. When I get chance, I'll put some samples on here and see what people think.

Thanks for replying and I'm always open for any other thoughts or suggestions.

[laxman]

It might be easier to make a layered shader. The make a ramp in projection mode. Scale the projection and put it to the side of the mountain. Then Make two sliders in the ramp, one balck and one white. Map the ramp to the transparency for the first layer in the layered shader. Then put you mountain texture on the bottom layer and the gold texture on the top layer of the texture. That way you can animate what part of the mountain gets which texture, so you could have the animation change the mountain from normal to gold if you want, or just have the flexibility to choose.

Using the layered shader will allow you to plug materials in, so you can have bump maps and everything instead of just having colour.