Project Three Render

     It took me some time to figure out how to render my object properly, because I wanted to make sure that the contour lines of the 3D print were visible. At first, I wasn't able to find a material that looked like what I wanted, so I had initially tried emulating the contours by taking a set of contour curves from the tiara, spaced 1mm apart, fillet the corners of those curves and then apply 1mm pipes to them all, but this method was far too heavy on the computer. When I first applied it, I mindlessly applied the pipe command to all 1811 contour curves, freezing Rhino for so long, that I had to force quit the program. I retried by only applying the pipes to a few layers of contours at a time. The pipes didn't apply properly to all the curves, and I had to remove a handful of them. After this, I applied a translucent plastic material to the pipes, but this didn't look the way I wanted it to look.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    Unfortunately, due to the high number of parts, attempting a raytraced render nearly caused a memory overflow, subsequently causing the rendering engine to stop functioning until I restarted the program. 

    Though it sort of looked like what I wanted, this method turned out to be a burden on the computer, with visual lag and stuttering, and not to mention that the save file went from 60Mb to over 500Mb. So I scrapped and reverted to a previous save.

 

    Eventually, I figured out that the Plexiglass material in Rhino has options for using textures for normal maps in tandem with the base material, so I applied the hatching texture to the normal map, aligned it to the model, and scaled it down just enough to still have visible lines. 

 

    Unfortunately, this material darkens the object's transparency by a considerable amount, so I've decided not to used this method for the final render.

 

 

    I still was struggling to capture the fact that the 3D print was supposed to be hollow plastic shell, with a pigmented fluid inside of it. I was attempted to offset the surface of the tiara outward, to then use as the shell, but the tiara was too complex, and besides taking a long time to execute, there were several openings left behind that couldn't easily be closed. But then I realized I shouldn't be trying to offset the tiara after I've morphed it into shape, and should use the original pre-morphed shape object. After a few attempts, I was able to get an object that could act as the inside of the 3D printed shell. Then, after a bit more tweaking, I finally got a render that I feel represents what I'm envisioning for the end product.