I decided to do my texturing and rendering through Rhino and v-Ray rather than Keyshot, for two reasons. One, I really wanted to learn v-Ray. Two, my computer couldn’t handle my scene in keyshot, so I really had no choice!

It ended up not feeling that difficult, although I clearly have much to learn. I found texturing with vismats pretty straight forward, as these are already set up to wrap and tile well. The downfall of the vismats is that I found they gave you a pretty generic texture, tiled evenly over the entire object. For the focal part of my project, the Big Red Anaerobic Digester, I wanted a little more detail, so I created my own texture from an image of a weathered steel panel. This detail took a while, but gave the texture more definition. See below for the bitmap that I used for the colour and bumpmap, compared to the final render of my tank.