Materials for drum shells

igor · 5 Jun 2008, 21:48

hey, im looking for some textures to go on some drums that im going to make in SU (im a drummer, 4 years of practice). i would really appreciate it if someone who knows drums as well as i do would help me out here, but anyone else is fine too.
i also have another question. how do i get the texture on the drum without stretching it. like when i project a texture on to a cylender, the edges get all streched. in my 4 years of drumming, i have never seen a drumset finish do this, nor would i like to. the only method i can thik of to solve this is to devide the shell into 4ths and project the texture seperatly onto each section.

incase you didnt know, the shell of a drum is the part made out of wood (sometimes acrylic).

remus · 5 Jun 2008, 22:03

Im guessing your going for a naturaul wood finish rather than perspex or painted wood (both much easier to texture, of course )

My suggestion would be to turn on hidden geometry and paint the texture on to each individual face of the drumshell. This should give you a lot of control over hats goig where and should help prevent the stretching.

p.s. you can get loads of brilliant wood textures from a site called CG textures. Have a look in the fine timber/fine wood category, i think youll find plenty of suitable textures.

igor · 6 Jun 2008, 21:07

thanks for the reply remus. i want it to look like one continious peice of wood, witch you above method would not produce. i will keep trying though.

any idea on how to do a sparkle finish like this one: http://www.pearldrum.com/07-edit-site/combo/masters-custom-mast.jpg

remus · 6 Jun 2008, 21:16

Not really sure howd youd get the sparkly bits in the material, but itd be pretty straight forward to get the gradient (just make a gradient in an image editor then project it on to the drum shell.

I suppose if you were really keen, you could do the sparkles as physical geometry and than paint the with a shiny material, not sure how good it would look though.

remus · 6 Jun 2008, 21:28

Did a quick test with the projected textures and i dont think it turned out too bad.

The seam is very obvious though, if you had a bit of a think aobut it im sure you could work out a way to stop this, though.

If none of this works you could always wait for whaats new UV mpping plugin, apparently its going to do cylindrical mapping...

igor · 12 Jun 2008, 19:12

thanks remus, this really helped. and i wouldn't mind having the above finsich on my drumset. just make it shiny.

remus · 12 Jun 2008, 21:21

No problem, although i tihnk you'll be better of using whaats UV mapping ruby now, hould give you much better results. As for the shinyness you'll either need to find a texture thats got the shinyness baked in to it or render the drum set to make it look shiny. SU doesnt do reflection.

igor · 13 Jun 2008, 01:06

i know. btw, for future refference, the insides of the shells are ussualy not finished aside from a coat of varnish or laquer.

remus · 13 Jun 2008, 05:53

I shouldve known youd know And cheers for the pointer, i hadnt realised that before.

Ross Macintosh · 21 Jun 2008, 10:53

I attach a couple texture images that strike me as being kind-a drum like. I don't know who originally made them. I found them on a sharing site years ago.

Regards, Ross