Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=107&Form.ShowMessage=333018&Reply=334998#15

I wanted to comment on AgentSmith's shield work, but I'm a bit late in the day and the thread is about to fall off the edge of the world (I hate that about Renderosity). So I've started a new one. Please use the link above to refer to the original. First off I'd like to say what a brilliantly successful shield model that is. The texture work is terrific. A couple of technical comments: Bryce's 'greyscale to height' modelling is utilised for two object types - terrains and symmetrical lattices. Symmetrical lattices are simply terrains mirrored through the horizontal plane. For making 'closed' objects (such as the fish mentioned), the symmetrical lattice is best. For 'open' objects, like shields, it's better to use a straight terrain. A shield made from a symmetrical lattice would look like a flattened sphere when seen from the side. In the picture, it can be seen how the terrain is open and hollow when seen from below. AgentSmith has made great use of bump mapping to suggest the detail on the shield, but it is actually relatively straightforward to use the terrain editor for this. Having 'real' raised detail rather than the render effect you get from a bump map is often essential when objects are seen close up or from oblique angles. In the pic I used the small snippet of texture AgentSmith showed in his tutorial image, in the terrain editor. It's just a quick and dirty effort on my part, but the plain textured version shows the detail is there in the mesh and not from a bump map. I also threw some basic textures on the thing for the 'finished' example. The only 'filtering' done in the terrain editor was to 'lower' so as that the image in the 2D work window became very dark with hardly any contrast. That gets rid of the spikes in nearly all cases, and no smoothing is needed.