Hello there, I have finished texturing and rendering the rings I chose to go with. They have come out quite well I guess, they're not quite displayed as I intended but I'm happy with the result. I struggled a bit with creating decent textures in cycles render, but I got there.
The first I textured was the push ring. I started by choosing a HDR image to light the environment which I sourced from a site called www.hdrlabs.com. I then put a black and white converter node on the output to take the colour out. I was going to block out the image and just use the light but after creating a glossy black surface for the ring to sit on I could see some interesting lines and patterns in the reflection so I kept it in. The material is a combination of glossy, diffuse and glass shaders. I was going for a silver metal.
I then rendered out the image at 1920x1040 pixels with a sample rate of 2048. I used the same render setting for each image. This took around twenty minutes to render and once it was done I had to rake it into photoshop because the reflected imagery was pixellated. I created a mask layer for the background and applied some Gaussian blur just enough to take out the pixellated look. I think it looks good because it resembles a photographic trick and then cropped it to make the ring the primary focus and the reflection the second focal point.
This next ring turned out way more colourfully than I expected. I always wanted gold some I manged to wrangle a nice shiny texture. I had to then texture the gems which took quite a bit of messing around, I probably still didn't quite nail it but I think they still resemble real gems pretty well. Choosing the colours for the smaller gems and how they would appear took quite a while. I was thinking of alternating them but that might have made it just too much. I decided to do each half of the tiers a different colour.
I then thought about what type of lighting and maybe using the same sort of effect as the first image but with a different background. Looking around I found a nice galaxy image on hdrlabs, I thought this might enhance the vibrancy of the ring and it sure did. I rendered out the ring and took it into photoshop because it was a bit dark and lightened it, I also cropped the image because the ring looked too small in a widescreen format.
This next image is my spiral ring, I feel it's the weakest image of the three. It was a bit of a struggle from the start this one from the modelling to completing the texturing. When I tried doing a Boolean modifier for every gem it soon became way too slow to carry on meaning there must have been many vertices being added every time, so I did a bit of a cheat and selected the vertices in the middle of each gem and pulled them down using proportional editing to crate a divot for the gem to sit in.
I used a yellow gold for the metal and darkened the emerald green gems for more emphasis. I know what I was going for here but I didn't quite achieve it. I was going for alot of green anyway but maybe in a more gentle way. I took this into photshop and increased the saturation. I also changed the yellow blue balance towards the blue side which bought the overall colour of the image into more of a balance.
Here is a picture of the node structure for my gold material, there is a glossy shader as the primary mixed with the output from a mixed glass and diffuse shader. As you can see I have weighted the material more towards the glossy side, using the glass diffuse shader.
The gem material was a combination of glass and glossy shaders with a touch of emission that I ran through a transparency modifier. The emission was to give the gem a little brightness and I used the colour panels to change the colour of the gem.
After initial consultation, it was recommended the I take out the background and just have the rings on a plain black surface which is what I will do to exhibit the images.
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