Any Element 3D pros that can help me out with textures?

Report · Nov 12, 2020

Hi,

I basically only do editing and 2D Motion Design, but a client asked me if I could animate a couple of .obj files of their products, no fancy lighting or anything, just have the object rotate a couple of times. I thought it should be easy enough since I've played around with Element 3D before. However I'm running into some problems when it comes to textures. The folders include a couple of tifs, namely the normal texture of the packaging, one called "Displacement", one called "CW_Opacity_40g" and one called "CW_Bump_40g".

I've converted them all to png, and I've managed to put the packaging one on the object by pulling it on the Diffuse tab of the material, although I've had to change the UV offset slighty.

I put the one called Bump on the Normal Bump tab and it seems to work fine although it looks a little bit stretched, but nothing too bad.

However, I can't get the Displacement and Opacity pngs to work. The Displacement one wouldn't be too big of a problem, but the Opacity is supposed to create a sort of spiky edge on the object which I definitely need. Putting it on the occlusion tab seems to get the closest, but even with offset I can't get it centered exactly, it looks very stretched, and also the rest of the object just becomes noticeably black and doesn't actually disappear.

Screenshot of the edge, the lines are created by the bump map, the edge is part of the Displacement file.

It's supposed to look like this: https://www.muskelmacher-shop.de/media/image/88/6d/dd/M-M-s-Hi-Protein-Bar.jpg

Is there anyway to do this right or would I need to use Cinema4D? My experience with that is very limited so I was hoping to get this done in Element.

Thanks!

Report · Nov 12, 2020

There are severe limitations to using an OpenGL based render engine like Element 3D, including how transparencies are handled, texture sizes and aspect ratios and so on plus on top of it is of course entirely dependent on your graphics hardware. Chances are that this will never work to your satisfaction, beginning with the fact that OpenGL textures still ideally need to be perfectly square or at least not excessively stretched to reduce the impact of filtering. That this is not the case is all too obvious in your image and the textures also appear to be way too low res for a decent 3D render, regardless which engine you use. so even if you were to move on to C4D, you'd still likely need higher res versions to get reasonable results.

Mylenium