Honeycomb

Hope you like purple honey?

Wow, the bees really have a chore.  I Broke down and decided to actually model the honeycomb panels…

It was actually a fairly simple process as I just duplicated, aligned, and joined hexagons  until I had enough for one vertical panel segment roughly the height of the door.  Reference images show that there were approximately 6 hexagons across any single window frame so I think I got the scale pretty accurate.  After duplicating these to make eight distinct panels and then repeatedly beveling the individual hexagons to get the framed/sunken effect I wanted, I had quite a few polygons on my hands,  but remarkably, it was still easy to handle.   Simple, but a little tedious.   I created a temporary door frame and floor as well just for reference.

Did these higher rez images.  First one was pretty fast as I turned off the refraction index completely, and it looks pretty decent even though it still looks a little too transparent.

On the second I used a refraction setting of 1.1 and a refraction blur of %50, then added a little extra fill light.  It took considerably longer but I was very pleased with the results.

UPDATE:

With my new Mac mini set up and the latest version of Lightwave finally installed I was able to re-render the same image with refraction settings in place- a process that took about 2.5 hours 2 nights ago.  This time I rendered it with radiosity engaged and it took all of 30 minutes to complete.  I am one happy camper. 😀

I still have a lot to learn and catch up on.  😀

~ by starstation on March 10, 2009.