The second custom egg we created was Ei:gentum Nr. 163, owned by “Gerolamo Rossi”. He wanted a really polished egg made of solid gold, something that was missing from the Ei:gentum collection.
While the egg should be solid gold, he wanted the background to be silver foil.
Now, the thing is that solid gold (or any metal) is relativly easy to make in 3D. The challenge with this egg was the background. Silver foil. Extremely hard to get right.
So i created the gold egg first. Here it is in front of a white background.
My idea for the silver foil was to combine different noise textures. A noise texture is a randomly generated black and white image based on different math algorithms.
You can stack multiple of these on top of one another and combine them to get some nice looking variation in your material.
For the silver foil i didn’t use them as color input but as roughness and bump/displacement input. What does that mean?
The roughness of a surface describes how shiny it is. A high roughness (visually white in an image) is not reflective at all. For example, a painted wall does have high roughness.
A low roughness is really reflective (visually black in an image). A mirror has nearly 0 roughness.
The second essential part of the silver foil was the bump or displacement. You can get really fine details and surface imperfections with this. Here, we used it to get all the little wrinkles in the silver foil.
All that happens in the node-shader editor. Here is the final node setup for the silver foil material.
We had many diffrent iterations of the background until we and Gerolamo Rossi were satisfied.
In the end we are happy how it turned out and we think Gerolamo Rossi is too. It was fun and challenging to create something like this, i had never made a silver foil material before.
Cheers, Ronnie
