Geometry changes, Glass shaders and Topology....the joys.

Over christmas I have been Unwrapping and texturing my little robot. I haven't uploaded my blog in a while tho so here we go. Before I started to unwrap my robot, I got some advice from James Whatling that I could possibly push my polycount higher, as I was only on about 1900tris, I pushed him up to about 3500tri's by adding extra geometry in relevant places to create smoother looking edges. I mainly focused on making the head, body and arms more visually interesting.

With this one I eventually optimized the topology again as I didn't like the fact it wasn't quadded.

Added a few extra edge loops to make it more circular.

After I fixed the topology that needed fixing and added in some extra details to add to the visual interest of the robot, I wanted the screen to be realistic and reflective; so I created a glass shader in max and created a little oblong to slot into the screen area and applied my shader too it.

My raytraced glass shader.

I used raytracing and super sampling to create my glass shader and upped the specular intensity to about 250 and the glossiness to 75, this gave me a nice glass effect and looks nice when rendered.  

Here's the glass giving a nice reflection along with transparency and light refraction.

after completing this I moved onto unwrapping and texturing stage for my little robot.