Reflection on Batman Tumbler - Part 3: Checking Angles

This is the final part of a material walkthrough for Batman Tumbler model. I explained the problem in Part 1 as well as offered a partial solution. Part 2 followed up with map manipulations to improve the render.

At the end of Part 2, I got this render.

Figure 1. Render at the end of Part 2.

It looks pretty good: the metal parts have reflection and dirt details at the front part can be seen. Now it is time to check renders of other frames.

The roundtable animation has 120 frames. At this stage, I do not want to render every frame yet. Instead, I rendered every 30 frame to get four different angles of the Tumbler.

Figure 2. The rendered four angles

Looking at the 2 back angles, I found the back wheels looked too "painted" due to the Diffuse map. To reduce the painted feel, I composited Noise maps on top of the Diffuse bitmap. As figure 3 shows, I used 2 Noise maps to break the regular look of the Noise maps.

Figure 3. Composite map to reduce the painted feel of wheel diffuse

For consistency, I made the same modification to the front wheel Diffuse map. Here are the final renders. (On hindsight, the front wheels look too new in these renders.)

Figure 4. Four angles of the final render

I turned on Final Gather to make the shadow areas brighter when rendering the final video. I made further minor parameter tweaks that made the final video look slightly different from the renders above.
Here are two points about Arch & Design that I learned from this test:

• Setting Reflection Glossiness very low will result in dark or even black reflections.
• Reflection Color should be close to white.

I hope you find this walkthrough useful.

Credit: The Tumbler model and textures were created by Henry Chan.