I created this 3D model of my favorite ring to focus on inorganic modeling and texturing skills. I wanted to challenge myself with the intricate shape of the flower and force myself to really study and look at a real life object in order to recreate it. I found it super helpful to be able to reference a physical object to be able to add convincing wear and tear. It was important to be able to see how the light hit the surface in different ways.
This model was created in Maya and rendered with Arnold. Some of the detail of the textures were painted in Photoshop.
The shading network I developed for this object consisted of two separate shaders, one for the shiny metal and another for the dull dirt/dust, driven by ambient occlusion. That is, areas that are partially hidden by other faces of the object are shaded with the dirty shader and the outermost, exposed faces are shaded with the shiny metal shader.
The turntable below shows how the ring reflects light and how there are signs of wear and tear in the form of scratches, smudges, and nicks.
Here you can see how the shader is built up. The metal shader (top left) and dirt/dust shader (top right) are mixed together with an augmented ambient occlusion map (bottom left) to get the final shader (bottom).
