What's up guys, welcome back!
When you're first starting out with Non Metallic Metals, there are two main stumbling blocks
you need to overcome before you begin to get a convincing effect.
The first is contrast, and the second is highlight placement.
We'll look at contrast in a future video.
But today we're going to be focusing on how to place your highlights.
It might seem confusing at first but like most things, once you understand the why,
the how will become easy after a bit of practice.
First you need to understand how light reflects on 4 basic geometric shapes.
On a flat square like this,
I think you'll find that's a rectangle
Shh!
Shut it you...
the highlight will be at the furthest point from your light source.
So essentially the light flows over the surface and comes to rest at the lower edge.
If the light was over here on the right the highlight would be at the lower left corner,
whereas if the light was on the left, it would be at the lower right corner.
This doesn't have to be 'a square' it can be any flat surface.
Next up we have the Cylinder.
On a cylinder the highlight will be directly below the light source, stretching along the
length of the cylinder with the light fading out from that point following the shape of
the surface.
Notice that the highlight always matches the shape of the object.
After the cylinder we have the cone.
Which is essentially a cylinder that's been squished to a point at one end.
Again the light reacts much the same as with the cylinder, with the highlight being directly
below the light source.
However, instead of being a thin line across the length, your highlight will be more of
a triangle; matching the shape of the cone, with the light beoming less intense as it
moves away from that initial highlight point.
The other side of the cone will be a mirror image, allowing you to paint both sides in
exactly the same way.
The last object is a sphere.
Again, the highlight will be directly below your light source.
The surface is round, so in order to match the shape of the object your highlight should
also be round, with the light fading out from that point, following the shape of the sphere.
In practice these are usually the hardest parts to paint as it can be quite difficult
to create circular highlights.
With these four highlight rules, you have a solid foundation for creating a realistic
metal effect on your miniatures.
Before we look at how to apply these on a miniature, It's important to understand two
basic concepts.
Firstly we'll look at a prinicple called opposites.
Lets say you have several flat sections joined together.
The highlight on one section should end where the shadow begins on the other.
So if we have the light shining down from above here, the highlight is on the lower
corner of the square.
But if we place another piece on top, we see the highlight ends up directly opposite to
the shadow on the other section.
Notice the same concept is applied here on the end piece of the cylinder.
You can see the shadow of the circle is right next to the highlight on the main surface
of the cylinder.
If you want to make things a bit more interesting you can utilize a concept I like to call 'the
bounce'.
Now there's a lot of technical stuff involved in this where your shadows represent the horizon
line, the ground or other objects close to your metal but I think it's easier just to
think of it in terms of light bouncing over the surface.
To illustrate what I mean.
Imagine you have a long flat surface like this.
And your light is shining down from above.
On a small flat section, we know from earlier that the highlight would gather at the furthest
away point from the light.
But on a long section such as this it's better to imagine the light bouncing along the length,
much like a stone skipping over water, creating a highlight, or ripple each time it hits the
surface.
Try not to make these equidistant, the space between each bounce should be fairly random.
If they are too uniform it will look unnatural and you'll lose the effect.
We can apply the exact same concept to a cylinder.
So we'll have our initial highlight here, then the light is going to bounce over the
surface in both directions creating these little stripes of light and shadow.
Notice your first highlight is going to be the strongest and the light becomes more difuse
as you move away from that point.
Also notice the light stops bouncing just before we hit our darkest shadow.
If we use our stone skipping analogy.
Imagine you had a cylindrical lake floating in space, you're stone is only going to be
able to do a few jumps before it has nowhere left to go and just falls off the edge into
the abyss below.
We can apply the same bounce idea to our cone, the only difference being that the light continues
to bounce all the way around.
On a sphere the light only bounces once.
Technically it doesn't actually bounce over the surface, it bounces off the sphere, deflects
off the ground and comes back to hit the sphere from below.
But it's easier to think of it just bouncing on the surface.
Now the trick when applying these concepts on a miniature is to look at each section
of the model and work out whether it could be represented by a flat, a cylinder, a cone
or a sphere.
As a rule of thumb, curved areas will be cylinders, rounded sections will be spheres, curved areas
which are tapered will be cones and hopefully flat areas should be self explanatory.
When you're starting out, space marines are great to practice this on, as each section
is very simple to work out.
So now that you have all the shapes in place, it's simply a matter of deciding where your
light source is going to be, you'll be able to work out the position of the highlights
by simply using the rules for highlighting those four basic shapes.
Let's have a look at a couple practical examples so you can see how this works on an actual
model.
Here on this Ogre I've painted Green Metallic Armour parts.
This shoulder pad can be clearly broken into three sections, the centre part is a cylinder
and the two outer parts are slightly tapered therefore we can think of them as Cones.
So you can see that I've used the highlighting rule for cylinders on the middle section with
the main highlight running across the centre of the armour plate, fading out into a shadow.
I got quite a nice effect just with that one highlight so I didn't bother using the bounce
concept.
I think with all the other little details on their going for multiple highlights might
have made it look a bit too busy.
The two outer parts were painted in much the same way as the main section but with a slightly
more triangular highlight.
In hindsight I should have made the taper a bit more pronounced so that's a small mistake
on my part.
Also, notice I've put a dark line here to seperate the three areas.
This gold star motif is a flat surface so I've put the main highlight towards the lower
edge.
These two gold rivots are round so I've used the sphere rule, putting a strong circular
highlight near the top which fades out to a shadow along the lower side, following the
shape of the sphere.
Let's look at a more complicated example.
On Angron I went for more of a dirty gold colour.
At first glance it looks quite intimidating but once we break down each section it becomes
much easier to understand.
This rounded top section here is a very skinny cylinder, so I've added my main highlight
here, under the light source and then it fades out to the shadow following the shades of
the cylinder.
Notice I've also used the bounce concept to add a second highlight here, I've made a small
mistake because that second highlight shouldn't be as strong as the main one and I should
have added another bounce highlight on the other side around here.
Remember the light bounces in both directions.
So if I was to paint it again, that's defininitely something I would correct.
This area here is a flat surface, but because of the way it's tilted it's not going to catch
much light but you can see that I've added a subtle hightlight here and here, to add
some contrast between the highlight and shadow on the connecting section.
These little studs are spheres and I should have given them a bit of a brighter highlight,
not that big of a deal but definitely something I could improve on.
All this banding work is essentially lots of flat sections.
I have made one pretty glaring mistake, I'll give you a couple seconds to work it out.
If you picked this part here, you're correct.
This should really be the same colour at this section, you can see on the other side I've
done it correctly as the light is consistent.
I must have had a bit of a brain malfunction or something when I was painting it.
So anyway, as these are flat sections, the light is going to travel down and gather at
the lower edge here, and because it's essentially a long thin piece we're going to use the bounce
concept.
So the light bounces round creating little light flares as it hits the surface.
Also notice the use of opposites, where the sections connect.
His forearm is a series of connected cylinders, so we have the main highlight running along
the top here and it fades out to the shadow as the light moves away to the sides.
The little spikes are flat surfaces so we've put the highlight at the bottom and the shadow
at the top.
I should have added a bounce highlight on the forearm sections just here so that the
shadow of the spike was pushed up against a highlight on the armour plates.
This little plate on the hand is a flat surface so I've made a little mistake there as well,
the highlight should be going in the other direction.
You can see that even with quite a lot of mistakes you can still get a convincing effect.
As long as you understand the basic premise the odd mistake here and there isn't the end
of the world.
Alright guys, so I hope that helps to demystify how to approach Non Metallic Metals.
As I said at the start I'll probably do another video on contrast as that's a pretty key concept.
If you're unclear on something feel free to drop a comment down below and I'll do my best
to answer.
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really help me justify spending more time on creating these videos for you.
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Thanks again.
Bye for now....