I spent some time last night updating the CAD model for the Arts & Crafts sconce I want to build. All of the changes were to be able to render the lamp shade so it represents the actual look of the stained glass I plan to make. Modeling the basic shade is simple, it’s just four trapezoid-shaped panels joined together. Drawing the layout for the glass — the dragonfly outline — is pretty simple too. It’s just a series of splines that I have to tweak to get the shapes I want.
To get to a model of the glass that I can render I have to add in the raised solder seams, and I have to trick the model into thinking it is ten separate pieces of glass so that I can attach different rendering properties to each. Not hard, just time consuming, and the software is slightly quirky in this area (or maybe I don’t fully understand how the new rendering engine in this version is supposed to work).
Anyway, here is what I came up with. Not perfect, but it gives you a pretty good idea what the finished sconce is intended to look like, which is the whole point.
Nice design and I like the quality of the rendering too.
Its so nice that you can make these renderings ahead of time. It would certainly help manager “client” expectation for me if I could do such a nice job.