My team mates wanted gears to replace the 8. I don’t really like that idea, because it just seems too ordinary and unimaginative or something. I tried to make them look best I can, and less tacky. I used ambient occlusion maps to fake shadows, and an hdri map for fake reflections. I does also reflect itself and the floor too. The material I used in this render is what I call soft aluminum. I made it using various settings in the Arch and Design material.
Anyways, hope you guys like it, and I wouldn’t mind some feedback on it. If you have any questions, I will try my best to answer them.
Looks great! I agree that the gears are not very original, though I wouldn’t call them tacky. I think they look great, but not very eight-ish. I thought you were team 125 until I read the post. Perhaps you make the holes in the center larger, so it’ll look more like a regular eight with teeth around the edges.
If you want to include the gears in a different way, maybe you could make a more reflective material and then throw in some gears where they’ll show a little bit on the numbers.
Thanks for the feedback. I thought it looked like 125 too, but my team said it looked good to them, so maybe I will do something about that after all. Also I tried to use a chrome texture, but I got all sorts of jagged edges that no amount of anti aliasing would fix. It looks a lot better like this, but maybe I will use less glossy samples or something.
These gears have 18 teeth and 16 teeth with a hole radius of 15 units. The extruded part of the hole is 10 units across on both of them. My opinion, is they look almost the same size.
These gears have 18 teeth and 14 teeth with a hole radius of 15 units. The extruded part on the top gear is 5 units across, and the extruded part on the bottom gear is 10 units across.
These gears are also 18 teeth and 14 teeth, but the hole sizes are different. The top gear has a hole radius of 10 units while the bottom gear has a hole radius of 15 units. The extruded part of the gear on both is 10 units across.
Which set do you think will be more pleasing to the eye?
Right now it looks like a circle hovering above another, because the eye is drawn to the holes. Perhaps you could overlap the gears to make it more eightish?? For example, make it look more like a transmission: The bottom could be a small gear on top of a large gear, and the top gear could mesh with the small gear. I think that the closer you can get to having the (hubs?) intersect, the better.
