MMC Laboratory - Small Minds

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Spacekdet: Are you sure you want a Clostridium Sapiens pizza? Their cousins Clostridium Tetani and Clostridium Botulinum cause tetanus and botulism. By comparison to the 8"x10" grid paper the dishes must be large. The flasks do look small but I wanted them to fit in the picture and the city shows well from this angle.

Steve: Only the dishes have SDS. One level of it. I made the flasks and dishes from a profile with the lathe tool and and gave them plenty of sides. The flasks look good without SDS and the dishes have better glass effects with it. My earlier attempts had more SDS. Here's some wires.

To make the flask contents:
1. Entered point edit mode on a flask.
2. Selected the top part with rectangle select with backside on.
3. Separated selected part.
4. Deleted the top.
5. Selected all outer surface faces with free hand select and add to selection on.
6. Separated then deleted the outer surface faces.
7. Closed the top with the tip tool using x,y,z = 0 and 1 segment.
8. You may need to flip the normals of the contents object. They probably point toward the inside of the object but should point to the outside of the object.

This produced a shape that fits in the flask inner surface. To get a good render make the contents shape slightly smaller than the flask's inner surface with the scale tool and the axes in the center of the contents. I made the different size content shapes using using steps 1-4 and 7. Give the contents object a low refractive index, 1.12 or less works for me, to see good results if it is glassy or clear.

Rectangle and lasso select with backside off selected half of the flask with the outer surface and the other half's inner surface. That is why I used free hand select.

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Wires of the Erlenmeyer flask and Petri dish. The dish on the left has one level of SDS as in the finished picture.

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I've been working on the flask contents and glass. None of these objects are subdivided.

Glass: I found that artifacts like the vertical light streak are fixed by using the smooth faceting option. That is on the same material editor control as autofacet. SDS also fixes it but the poly count makes the render slow.

Contents: The refractive index must not be near that of glass 1.6. Strong lensing effects occur if it is high that I don't think look realistic. The round flask in the middle has RI = 1.12. I think it looks good. The top of the liquid is red and it appears to fill the container except for the glass thickness.

The RI's for the contents are shown on the image comments from left to right.

Which Erlenmeyer and which round flask do think looks best?

[froo]

uhhhmm... bacterium pizza? Eeeewww... Uhhhfff... <dry heave> I think I need a bucket...

[Tommy]

Nice work. I think something between the second and the third Erlenmeyer glas would bee the best. The surface of the liquid has to been seen in some way but with at lighter colour. The middle round flask is the best!

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Get well soon Froo.

Yeah Tommy, I think that's best for the flasks too.

Here is a new render. I took the reflection walls away and it renders in about 20 minutes now.

I wasn't getting the transparency I wanted on the bacteria "pizza". It was a two layer texture but the bacteria layer didn't look right. Now the agar cylinder is the same as the one on the left but there is a 2D disk above it with the bacteria and a transparency mask.

Raised the paper out of the table.

The flasks have smooth faceting on the glass and no SDS. The contents have RI = 1.12. The Petri dishes have 1 layer of SDS since the smooth faceting didn't help on them.

The flask contents still need work. The top is dark and more transparency is needed. I just checked and they don't have the settings I intended.

TS 7.6 model side. Lightworks render. Lighting is an array of infinite lights with no shadows for general light and one infinite with shadows.

I started a small Vritualight render. It looked good but didn't get to the top of the flask contents in an hour.

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These are wires of the jack tower, the wench, and the bridge. The coils are from the lathe tool. The strutting method using the shell too, discussed elsewhere in this forum, made the frames.

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The buildings of the city.

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New render. Adjusted the liquids and the lighting. The light array now has mapped shadows. The effect of that is subtle, most apparent near the round flask, but it added something to the picture. Changed the table top so there is something to show the transparency.

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This is my MMC entry.

There are wires of everything above.

I'll try this in Messiah 3D's GI renderer sometime.