SUBTLE FASTENERS and PANELS

Remember that I had black dots for the fasteners and black lines for the panel edges?  Here is the image.

This morning I did a little research and learned some things.  I knew I could change the nature of each row of dots but that would mean changing details on about a dozen layers in PhotoShop one at a time.  I took all of those “text” layers made up of “period”, “space”, period and put them into a group.  I then changed the “blending mode” for that group with the underlying color layers to “soft light” and varied the opacity (magnitude of the effect) to make the Dzus fasteners more subtle rather than just solid black dots.  Soft light doesn’t change the color but varies its intensity at the dot positions.  The effect is to make the fasteners look like they had been overpainted (which they are) and then worn a bit.  I put the panel edges and things in another “group” and can vary how “intense” that effect is independently.  The fasteners and panels can be adjusted independently and all at once.  There are about six “regions” involved in the so-called UV map which makes the 3d surface into a squished 2d version and the fasteners have to be positioned on the panels by making movements in PhotoShop and checking the rendering in Cinema 4D by saving the PhotoShop image and then reloading it into C4D and rendering.  But it does all work.

What remains to be done is to change the scale factor on the Dzus fasteners right at the spinner in the aircraft long direction so that the fasteners are not stretched by the curvature.  No big deal.  I now think I have one of many possible workflow scenarios figured out to simulate fasteners and panels.  There is a lot more that can be done with PhotoShop as well as by making so-called “bump maps” for the textures in Cinema 4D.  This can go on and on forever but the results so far have been very encouraging.  An image of a subtle treatment of the Dzus fasteners and panel edges is shown below.

 +Dale Jackson +Åke Jonsson +harley harp