Modeling Lipstick, Part 4

This is a follow-up tutorial (to Part 3 here) dealing with rendering spline-based objects as polygons when the object has a transparent and refractive material. It shows how to adjust the object to get the best possible appearance.
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Modeling Lipstick, Part 3

In the 3rd part of the the lipstick tutorial dealing with modeling, the clear plastic cap is examined for its potential to greatly impact render times. The lathe object is a spline based object and this can be slow to render when a refractive material is used. This tutorial shows how to render it as a polygon based object to get the best render time. A follow-up tutorial going into some further details regarding Render Splines as Polygons on objects with refractive materials can be found here.
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Preventing white areas of label art from blowing out

This rendering and texturing tutorial discusses the use of ‘rich white’ (akin to rich black used for printing blacks using all 4 cmyk components) to help prevent areas of label art from blowing out. This technique also allows for reflections to overlay the white areas. Additionally, the concept of gamma and how Design 3D handles this relative to imported art is discussed.
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Compound Paths in the 8.2.1 Update

In this tutorial I show how changes in 8.2.1 make for a much better experience when working with bezier data brought in from Adobe Illustrator which has compound paths. The updated handling of this data makes for easier modeling and can help improve render performance (polygons render faster than bezier structures generally). In general it’s better to use the Thickness function when giving imported bezier profiles thickness instead of the bezier extrude tool when render performance is important. This is because polygon data is faster to render than complex bezier regions and this tutorial demonstrates this.
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