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I inherited from my parents a heavy locked metal box, which my dad inherited from his dad.
There was no key to open it, and it ended up, for over 30 years, high up in the back of my parents' closet, where I rediscovered it last year after their passing.
It took a while before I found a locksmith willing to come open it for me. I'd hoped that whoever finally showed up would be able to open it without damaging the box. Unfortunately, that proved impossible, so the locksmith drilled/sawed out the lock and gave it to me, unlocked but unopened.
*Ka-tching* that's then €120,- Euro's sir.
It's been standing here on a glass table since May 21, still unopened.
I think it's time to discover what's inside. I don't think my wild fantasy will come true, like there being gold in it, or fingers... (I've seen too many horror movies). But it will be interesting to see what my grandfather considered so precious that he had to store it. (He was, among other things, a coin and stamp collector and a lover/collector of female beauty, last just like my other grandfather.)
What do you think will be inside this box?

I made this image in 2002. Part of the models where made by Matt Wilson, part where re-remodeled using Matt's models, by me just to get some tri's away. It's just (another) 'tick' I have, I just cannot stand to see (unneeded) tri's (triangular shapes) in 3D models. >.>All nice and dandy you may say. Yet at some point I started to dislike the image, for one and probably the most nagging thing in this image is that she doesn't really shine. Her suit has this somewhat dull shine over it. It doesn't has this shine as magical as polished latex has. There's no 'snug vacuum sealed' feeling.Secondly there's something 'wrong' with the camera angle, the way the 'pool' tries to cut out of the bottom of the image, gives it a quit distorted feeling.And thirdly I f-ed her face up.Which is the reason why I never went over this image again, which should be easy. Just reload the 3D C4D file, re-render, open up in photoshop, pick up the paths of the final image, polish the girl up and put the 2 together.Alas, something something went terribly wrong around 2002 as for starters I couldn't find the final image nor the 3D file. Which meant I had to start largely from scratch. And with a 'been there, done that' feeling I just left the image and moved on to other projects. Though it didn't completely disappear from my mind.Working on these new 4Forums I looked through my Cinema 4D files & models to see if I could add some nice free 3D models to the download section and ran into the communication tower from Space 1999.Because of some unneeded tri's here it can use another remodel round but this got me thinking back of this old image from 2002 and I for some reason really liked the idea of taking it up again and fix all those things that where nagging me. So step 1: re-re-model some of the most basic Moonbase Alpha shapes. And then just start putting the modules together in a way that resembles (somewhat) the old background.I do modelling, texturing and lighting as I go. It's said you should keep those 3 separate but, meh, it's how I like to work. Going over some research over at Google... I noticed that those light emanating planes are quite different then how I use them above. Just a texture with lumination on a polygon and global illumination in the render settings.You cannot use it alone as light source because of the many ugly artefacts iit creates. These plastic panels aren't emitting light anyway they only pass it through as you can see here:You can see that it are milky-white panels with a large light source behind. Also notice how light fades away to the sides and bottom. Only thing I could find how this worked in reality was an image of a tall wooden pole and 3 bulbs of light on it that was lighting the milky-white panels from behind. Not an option for me here, so I'm experimenting with something else.I made a milky-white texture with specular, reflections and some transparency put that on the panels that let light trough and then behind them, not only put a "real" light but also build a light emitting box that gives some fake impression of some space being behind the walls. Creating a more realistic feeling then a light emitting texture on a polygon.This 'light-box' goes behind the round walls, and I have a similar one square shaped for plain straight walls. This is as far as I got before deciding to put my attention back on the next image I had been working on just before I picked up the idea to redo 'patrol'.

I just dug up how long ago I started this project. It was 2014 when I wanted to redo 'sticky' and I started by trying to build a modular 3D environment. When I got most things together a few problems arose:

- The structures where textured way too clean. They had no chipping and barely any signs of wear and tear. The only way to do that at the time known to me was to UV unwrap all my 3D models and manually texture them. I've been there. Tried it enough times to know I hate that part of 3D with a passion. The results, if done right, are amazing. The time it consumes though is enough for me, even without the hate part, not to consider it.

- The whole scene is for some unknown reason way too heavy on my machine. It has over 4 Million polygons. Moving my camera around takes "ages". And on top of that I have artifacts when rendering.

- So I have a young woman standing in an empty hallway dressed in latex, slightly shocked/rattled by something, something. Why's she there? What's she doing? Why's she shocked/rattled?

I had no, zero point zero, idea at the time.


Work in progress 2014

So I needed a reason for her to be rattled, needed to cut down on the polygons, figure out how to get rid of the render artifacts and find a way to give the place a more worn look. At the time I could not find a way to fix 2 of these problems so I stored the project and moved on.

Years later I learned how to add a worn/chipped look to 3D objects (thank you, Samuel Winter - digitalmeat.uk) and while being in a tentacle mood (Hows your mood today? Oh, very tentacly!) I was playing around with a new way to destroy things in Cinema 4D through something called 'Voronoi'. I put those 3 together, remembered this abandoned project and picked it up to see what, if any, I could do with it and 4 more years of knowledge. 

I rebuild the project by copy-pasting every single 3D object from the old into a new project file and while re-texturing those I could see if they had an unreasonable amount of polygons and if necessary rebuild them. From more then 4 million poly's originally I brought the file down to less then 900.000. From there I broke the floor open, added some tentacles and hit the render button so I could focus on redressing the main character into a nice one piece shiny catsuit.

After signing up for free to the 4F website there are 2 easy ways to upgrade to the (free) 'Advanced Members' group.Just say hi (by replying to this topic), or write a bit more if you like, and you become automatically an 'Advanced Member' to this site.Or:Follow a forum or gallery here on 4F-Creations.Please note that you must have the option enabled to receive an occasional (short, 1-2x/month) newsletter. After becoming an 'Advanced Member', you can unsubscribe from the 4F newsletter if you want.  (But then you won't know if and when I add new stuff to this place.)As an 'Advanced Member' you will get access to many features of this 4Forum and of course - Access to ALL the 4F artwork images in high resolution until 2016. All that for the price of one post or 'follow' here. Do not hessitate to ask if you have any questions. I'll do my best to answer, if time permits me.Sincerely,--Rick (4)F. van Koert