[Blender 3D] From Metaball to Faucet Spindle and Stainless Steel Material.

After we finished our pipe object, now we will try to add its faucet spindle with a little help from metaball feature. I want to make it quick so let’s just start it, alright?

Open your last blender 3d practice file that have pipe object, change the viewport to top viewport, and create a metaball with shortcut: Shift + A choose Metaball —> Capsule. To minimize capsule radius without change its length, set the radius parameter to 0.2. You probably have a different radius value, it depends on the size of your pipe. Just make sure it has the right proportion.

Change the viewport to front viewport and rotate the capsule to 90d, so it’ll look like spindle.

Back to top viewport and add another metaball capsule. Set the proper radius, so it’ll shape like a handle. I set mine 0.14. You will see these two metaball will blend together.

Now, we will make another metaball object, but this time choose ball (metaball —> ball). Place it to the right end. Duplicate it and place the copy object to left end. This is how it suppose to look like:

We still need another handle though. Active top viewport, select the 1 capsule and its 2 balls, duplicate it, and rotate to 90d.

Add Stainless Steel Material:

Next job is to add stainless steel material. We can do this using mirror material and raytrace technique, but the process is too long. Beside there’s no additional object surrounded our faucet spindle. We will take a different approach by using a reflection texture material in image file. We call it fake reflection. First, go to google, and fine stainless steel material image reference.

Select the whole faucet object and make a new material. Just leave it as default. Except change the Specular: Intensity value to 1.

Now, create a new texture and choose Type: Image or Movie. Upload your stainless steel texture image and change the Coordinates = Reflection. Done!. This should be easy to apply.

What you all think?. I’m sorry if it’s not a step by step tutorial. I don’t want to repeat the same pattern guidelines anymore. Beside like I said above, it’s quiet easy to follow. But, if you still have question, just leave me a comment below. Share this article with your friends and thank you for reading.

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