I chose The Who's "Pinball Wizard" for my challenge entry. I'm working on the back display for the pinball machine. Here I use a 2D plane for the graphics. Any suggestions on material settings to make it look better? I'll be putting a glass face in front of it. I'll add the score display later.

The galss will give you some light reflection, yet you may want to use a sharpen or contrast filter on the 2D image before applying it, that'll make it pop a little more. It also depends on the lighting in your scene. experiment first and then tweak. Looks good.

A good start, and I agree with ICM. :) Probably you can give the metal a more "old" look, this looks a little too polished for being a pinball table. I'm sure you'll do a great scene! Greets, Jimi

looks good...yea, i'd say beat up the frame a little bit. Maybe a layer of the thinnest glass bubble over the top of the 2d plane...or somethin..

Great idea Jason, great theme, great start! (and great song) Agree with the others about the metal, but when you have something more than the default plane and sky to reflect, any mat you choose will improve the pic.

Looks like you may have the ambience color white, if so put a "marble" in the same channel that the diffuse color is in.

Thank you, everybody, but especially Aldaron. Putting the marble in the same channel for ambient solved my problem.

And try with making it Additive, as well as with raising the ambience value. That way you will probably get something that looks like a pane lit from the inside.

Additive?

My setting for the picture would be like this: Set the picture in both diffuse and ambient channel. Set ambience to 100% and set diffusion to the brightness of the picture. Then edit the ambience untill you get the brightness you want. This creates a very vivid texture, just like you would expect from a pinball machine.