Quick 'n dirty electron microscoop tutorialtje

The goal of this tutorial is the image below:

The image above was rendered with Brazil r/s, but Mental Ray which is included with Max will do just fine. Start with a geosphere (create panel->standard primitives->GeoSphere). Why a geosphere? Simple, a geosphere has a uniformly divided surface where all triangles are of the same size. And that's what we need right now.

Give this sphere a diameter of 60 units. In this case I'm using 5 segments, but it depends on how many spikes you want. Open the modify panel. Add an Edit Poly modifier and open the polygon editing part. Select all polygons (ctrl+a) and click the button next to the Bevel option in the edit polygon rollout.

The first thing we'll create is the basis for the spikes. Select "by polygon", set height to 1 and outline to -1 and press apply (this will apply the settings but leave the dialog window open).

We'll apply a few more bevels. Leave the outline amount at -1 but make the amount 5. This will create a nice base. Then apply 2 more with height 18 and outline 0,7. You should end up with something that looks like this:

Leave polygon mode and add a turbosmooth modifier and set the iterations to 2. Now we have spikes, but they're straight. So we add a noise modifier. Play a bit with the settings, for example:

This will yield something like this:

The biggest trick in this thing is actually the material. Open the material editor and choose a standard material. Add a falloff map to the diffuse slot with the following settings:

I choose a slightly blue tinted color, but it's up to you.

Go back to the root of the material and add a noise map to the bump slot with these settings:

Go back to the root of the material and set the bump amount to about 75. Assign this material to the object you just created.

Select a nice viewpoint:

The one thing that's missing is DOF (Depth of Field). Mental Ray supports this. Make sure yout camera's focal point is placed somewhere on the 'sphere' on the side of the camera. Set the F-stop to something small, say 0.74. By playing with the target distance it's possible to determine where the in focus part of the image will be. If you increase the f-stop, the are that is in focus will be bigger.

The end result will look like this:

Rinze van Huizen