Propeller improvemens

Making the propellers is a difficult task. For one it's a very strange shape and also it twists around. The propeller is designed like this because it needs to make a forward force and for the plane to move.

(Check page two of the sketch book to see drawings of some designs I have done)

Here is a picture of the original propeller with no improvements.

New propeller:

Now to move them into place and the replace the old ones.

Now with added motion blur.

I'm now going to add some texture to them.

I'm going to go into Photoshop and make a new image. The will be sized 256x256. This may seem like an unusual size but it's in the power of 2. This is what sizes games work from, if the texture sizes is not to the power of two the texture will not work, however I'm not using this plane for a game, but it's a good template to work from.

I have filled it in with basic colours.

At the moment it looks very basic and just wont do for my plane so I need to go and find a picture of some weathering. While at the Science and industry museum I took some pictures of some materials for my plane. So I can use one of them.

I'm going to manipulate the image so it gives a streek effect so it looks like the propeller has been spinning at high speed.

I have used Brush strokes - Angled Strokes to create a streek like effect to it.

I have appied it to the texture as a new layer.

Then to select an overlay effect. I have chocen Overlay because it has given me a satisfide effect.

However I think it could look better so I have changed the levels.

Now to appie the material to the mesh and too make it fit the mesh properly, for this I am going to use UVW mapping. It's a very basic tool for mapping textures to mesh but suitable for my propeller.

I'm now going back into the material propertys and select a pre-set of material propertys.

I went for Matte Plastic, because it gave me the right reflectiverty settings, light reflection and roughness.

For this render to work I need to change the render propertys. At the moment I am using 'mental.ray.lighting.high' I need to change this too 'mental.ray.photometric.lighting.with.gi'. This will apply the materials I have chosen, so it will make the plane less glossy and apply any textures.

Also to remember to add a daylight system. This day light system has been set up to work just like are real sun, it has month, day, year settings so you can set the sun up to a particular day in time.

He is the final result.