I would like to create an enamel filled dial. I modelled the layout in rhino. Easy enough > drew the lines and extruded them as solids. I have the gold frame and the colored fillings
However, if we look closely at the paint, we see that the paint is pulled upwards at the golden borders, just like water in a beer glass. How can I simulate this?
I tried with contour texture and a Geometrie node, but it doesn’t work! it offsets the geometry!
Thank you! Any advise is welcome!
This is something that Keyshot will struggle with, there’s not a really great way to do this, unless you can get an occlusion gradient to work with a fine enough displacement. in order for the displacement to work, the surfaces have to be connected. And the occlusion ramp will have to be super tight and dense around the inner edges of the enamel parts. I would try my best to model this effect, not have keyshot do it.
I tried with occlusion, the issue is that occlusion is a sort of a noise filter. Therefore it produces a grainy look. I may have to do this in illustrator, with a gradient…
I guess the model now consists of nurbs. If it would be a polygon model you could basically just select the lowest polygon loop(s) of every cavity and give them the color material after extruding.
I’m not sure if you can do such things easily in Rhino as well but since you want to actually change the materials at the bottom part it’s easier to do it in the modeller rather than to puzzle in KeyShot I think.
(edit: well basically telling the same as Matt, if you can select loops than it’s really easy or look from a front view so you can select just a small bit of it. Maybe there’s some slice thing in Rhino you can use to split the far bottom of the raised areas and give them material afterwards)
I will try that in Rhino! If it doesn’t work I bring the model or the curves into Blender. Never really used the mesh modelling tools in in Rhino. SubD would work as well, just that I am such an old school NURBS modeller 
I was just thinking, if those edges are not completely vertical but more like 110 degree or so you could just project the colors/material with a planar type texture.
Than you just make a orthographic screenshot from too view and you do the paint in illustrator or Photoshop.
That way you can also give it a bit of variation in how perfect you follow the shape so you get colors a bit higher and lower on the ‘ridge’.
Hard to see if they is a bit of surface for the paint. If you make a but of a bevel it’s also enough.
That’s actually the way I want to go. i believe the edges are more of a smooth transition. I don’t have a real sample at hand. If I would model it, I probably would use blender’s sculpting tools. I will first try to get a hi-res photoshop texture working. I tried with Illustrator, as it has the “Apply Gradient Across Stroke” Option, which could do EXACLTY what I need, BUT it seems to not work in combination with the Align Inside stroke…one of the reasons why I hate Illustrator…too many bugs.
So I will paint a BW mask in Photoshop and apply it as BUMP or Displacement Map.
Hi. I did something similar for a visualization I worked on for my company.
In Rhino, I used the ShrinkWrap feature to wrap the frame where the enamel will be infilled. You must dial the settings in just right to get the right “droop” of the paint. Turn off “Fill Holes In Input Objects.” Smoothing is key – a balance between smoothing and edge length to get a smooth transition from the walls of the frame to the surface of the paint. I used offset as well (0.1mm in my case) to make sure the paint didn’t show on the outside of the frame.
Then you just move the resulting mesh below the frame and put it on its own layer.
Illustrator has some weird habits. Sometimes you need to do some different things like using pathfinder of expand shapes and suddenly it works. But I also sometimes have to check some online tricks to figure it out. I use it pretty often but that’s most of the time the same stuff.
Think displacement will look less nice in the end, or you really get 100s of millions triangles
This is excellent advise! I would never have figured that one out! Thank you!
