Thursday 12 September 2013

Just in case...

...a cassette case...  That's the only case we're talking about here.

Since my previous post for "Galactic Abductor", I've now modeled up the case for it as well.  The insert came from an online archive housed at the awesome World of Spectrum site.   The cassette label itself I drew up in Photoshop based on images I found on google.  The hardest part of that cassette label was finding that funky font for the AR - but in the end, daFont delivered one that was almost identical.

As you'll see, I've changed the base colour of the cassette itself.  It was a light grey, but I decided I'd swap it to a darker black instead which I think feels a little better.  I can still easily swap it back, but I kinda like it this way.


I also modeled a proper screw head as well, decreased the appearance of the length of tape inside (its only a computer game - usually those were like 10 minute cassettes) and added in the red leader to it.  Overall, apart from perhaps a little more fine dirt or grunge here and there, I'm pretty happy with it.

The plastic reels also look more like white plastic...  A nice SSS shader with a good boost of Gamma to brighten it really helps sell that soft plastic appearance over the darker wax that I was getting originally.

So this cassette case...

The cassette case was fairly easy to model, made up of 3 separate parts.  The black back, the clear plastic front and the paper insert.  Perhaps the hardest part was getting the clear plastic surfacing to look right.  At first I tried to be clever and just plug in a Dielectric shader - it was ok but was taking a little while to get the look I needed for this plastic.  In the end the simpler approach of using a transparent surface with refraction, then a flipped normal version to un-refract worked out a lot better.  Chucked in a tiny amount of refraction blur to get rid of the perfect glassy look of the clear plastic as well...

Just like a new one...  Now, where did I put that cassette player?
 Still a work in progress before I'm satisfied, but its come along a lot quicker then I'd expected (a few hours, most of which were playing with surfacing and rendering)...  I'm dying to play a game of this right now, but that'll have to wait until I get a working Spectrum...

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