Kerosene Lantern

Kerosene Lantern
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This is a piece that was done for a class titled "advanced lighting". Strange name for a class that was really about modeling, but I'm not a school admistrator, so what do I know. In either case, the objective of this project was to teach us the process of modeling "high", and then taking it "low". This would include blocking out a mesh, detailing it, casting normals, then texturing the low poly object. Since I already had a decent grasp on this whole process, I decided to do a little extra at the end.
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9. Next I made the pressure dial with another spline, and the cap and hole that are used to put the oil into the bottom basin of the lantern. Now, as far as how this part sticks into the bottom of the lantern, I opted for a simple circular tube. I used this instead of another weld because several of the reference images I saw looked like that. Either the weld made was just really clean and smoothed/rounded out, or it's one whole piece manufactured that way.
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10. The next pieces I made were the metal outcroppings that the main handle of the lantern attach to, and the main handle itself. I saw several versions of this handle, but I like this one the most.
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11. The next part was fun. After looking at several images, and analyzing what that wire around the glass was really doing, and how. I came to realize they acted as a type of clamp to stabalize the glass. They're clamped to the arms for tension, then ran underneath and around the glass to grip it onto the lantern tightly.
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The metal outcroppings from above were used again and altered slightly for this lower part. The wire clamp was made with ... you guess it ... A SPLINE! It's one whole spline too. It starts at one end, loops under, up, around, and back again. It was a complex spline to make, but I'd hate to make that any other way.
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12. Finally, the finished, hi-poly, model.
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The above images were renders I produced to show the end result of the hi-poly modeling. It wasn't required to make either of these sets, but I think presenting your work well is an important layer of polish. Both were textured with Mental Ray Arch and Design shaders. In the clay wire renders I used a method I learned from Jeff Patton from The Gnomon Workshop.
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In the second image I also used AnD materials; what I used was a sort of off-shoot of a car paint material for the main painted area, along with some metallic and glass shaders for the other parts. I used a threeway lighting setup for the object, as well as an HDRI that was generated in a different class from the library at school using a chrome probe.
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This is the setup in 3dsMax of the scene used to generate the render seen at the top of the page. Using meta data from the image, I ascertained the correct focal length of the camera used to take the backplate photo, then matched that in Max's camera. From there I placed planes with the MR Matte Shadow Reflection shader appropriately and staged the camera. I used the same HDRI mentioned above. I used some lights as well as self illuminated materials for the inside of the lantern. In used the "lens_glare" shader in the "output" portion of the "camera shaders" in the render settings to get the glow. I later found a better way to do it in post to allow for more control in the comp, but I didn't get to implement it here. The major issue with using the lens shader like I did is that the specularity in the glass ended up getting affected by the glare too, and the result ends up looking a bit blown out. I did render this in passes with EXR embeded render elements, and then combined those using Nuke.
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