“Cardboard”

It’s pretty much the law…if you play in 3D, apparently you must, at some point,  create various “sphere” renders.

The most enjoyable part of this was what I always love doing and that was creating the texture (for the cardboard), it had to be quite large since I wanted it to not only stand up to rendering out large for print but also because the main sphere would be magnifying part of it. (small image textures rendered out large become visually pixelated and ugly)

At the time, I created the image texture at 4K but if I were to go back to this I would most likely re-ceate the texture at 8K because at the minimum, the render would be 3300 pixels across (for 11″ paper printing) and because of that big sphere’s magnification. Also, in case I ever made a poster print of it, it may be printed out 3 feet across (36″) which is 10,800 pixels. Add onto that, the main sphere magnifying the cardboard and I would really need a bigger image texture to stand up to that level of size so it would not look pixelated.

The best alternative to make sure there would be no pixelation would be to create a procedural texture to look like that ribbed cardboard and then make very large stencils of the typography and graphics that are “printed” on the cardboard and then use that to drive everything. Which would mean amazing quality of the image even when rendered out really huge.

It’s a thought…;o)