A basic chess set from 3D Palace's video tutorials. Based loosely on a contemporary chess set design, the pieces are relatively simple but modelled with a clear glass texture.
The lathe tool was used very heavily throughout the modelling process and is used for every single piece. The knight is a simple extrusion process with a lathed base which is then compounded to the actual knight body itself.
The lathe tool presents an "interesting" problem in terms of artifacts at the top and bottom of the object. This is most evident with the rook. Closer inspection of the area which should be castellated shows the pizza-slice effect which I really should've rectified at the time. Maybe I'll get round to it later.
Basic preview render of the pretty much complete chessboard. The mirror tool was used to create the set on the right of the chessboard, and as such copied the material assignment. So expect a game of chess on this set to get rather confusing after a while.
This shows the bishop's mitre and the rather peculiar raytracing around it as a result. Much more evident, however, are the artefacts - see the above brief description on the use of the lathe tool. It is very apparent on the base of the queen (to the left of the bishop) and the effect is compounded on the base and top of the rook, to give an effect which is politely described as "bloody awful".
Having redone the pawns, rook and knight this is the result. Apart from the nose of the knight looking somewhat peculiar, the artefacts have been significantly reduced, and a slightly smoother finish obtained. This was achieved through nothing more technical than a cap procedure, although it's surprising just how bloody annoying selcting polygons by click-and-drag, even with ignore backfacing selected, can be. There's always an extraneous polygon selected somewhere that really shouldn't be, for some reason. And it's easy to forget to always check whether ignore backfacing is turned on or off.
The knight had an additional couple of cuts performed on the major surfaces before a tessellation and NURMS subdivision were applied. The effect is, as you can see, not entirely worth the hassle unless the model was much better constructed in the first place. Ho hum.
Download the final chessboard scene, although this one contains the chess pieces with the artefacts.