surfacing tips?

[Jokerd007]

any ideas? i am no good at surfacing yet.

[sammael]

Im no expert but it looks like you might need to turn up your smoothing level a bit, mabe add a bit of grime too.

[kevman3d]

Hmmm...

You've got a tonne of smoothing errors on your dice surface.

When you're doing indents or bevels and want to keep things smooth, you need to do at least 3 bevels (small at start and end) to add a buffer to the smoothing effect so it gets calculated properly...

Here's a little picture to help explain the issue... Hopefully it helps to explain why 3 bevels works...

[kevman3d]

Also, here's a couple of other things you can do to fix smoothing errors...

(1) Select all the 'dot' surfaces and cut them, then paste them back. This breaks the flow across the polys and stops LightWave trying to smooth edges and causing those nasty errors...

Note: DO NOT merge points or you'll just reattach the edges of the dots back onto the dice.

(2) Lower the smoothing threshold to 45 degrees and test. Keep adjusting it down til the errors go away, however you may find all your smoothing starts to disappear, and you end up with a rough 3D object...


As for texturing

I'd probably adjust that specularity to give the dice a little more plastic-y shine. Knock the glossiness of the dice specularity down so it gives larger highlights, and make the dots specularity higher and 'more glossy' as its most 'painted'...

You could also experiment with transparency if you wanted to make some of those 'see through' plastic dice.