non-organic Printed Circuit Board

[Shipwright]

Originally Posted by MrTom

...that will be the 'transformers' for the 'balanced' line mic input then!!!!

Not transformers - audio transformers would be too large for that PC board. The inductors would help reduce any induced RF on the audio line.

The switches don't surprise me too much. Many of the older A/D converters used switches for gain settings. These were generally used on permanently installed systems that didn't require constant changes.

The other clue that leads me to believe this is an older A/D is that the components are all through-hole. I haven't seen a through-hole card in years - they're all surface mount now.

[MrTom]

Stop your grinnin' and drop your linin'.....found it!

I wont bore everyone with the details here but for anyone who's interested here's the actual product.

Errock.co.uk

Plenty of nice pics....I wasn't too far off with my guesswork...thanks again shipwright...maybe this will put your mind at rest.

....I only need to know one thing.....what it looks like!

Regards.

[section1]

That's really good and I'm glad to finally have seen some of your work and your site is good too I hope you don't give up on it. It's off to bed for me I have an early start it's graduation tomorrow.

[MrTom]

Originally Posted by section1

That's really good and I'm glad to finally have seen some of your work.....

LOL....thanks, but 'finally'?????? This whole site is riddled with examples of my work.....how could you miss it???

and your site is good too I hope you don't give up on it.

I hope so too. Circumstances shall dictate as to when or if I can continue with it....we'll just have to wait and see.

Thanks again for lookin in.....appreciated....and good luck with your graduation!

Regards.

[section1]

Well today's the day my last two final exams and the last day I'll the see the inside of that classroom.

[MrTom]

First off, a little explanation on the technique used for creating the PCB....please refer to the images above for any references to 'maps' or 'images'...these are the only maps used for the board.

Second is a 'warts 'n' all' collection of renders rapidly thrown together in what little time I had left. It's far from perfect and there are some errors, but I thought I'd throw them up in here anyway as this may be the last chance I get, so please pick the best ones for yourself...if there are any.

So, the board material:

I used a VRayBlend material for this as it allows me to 'layer' several, (up to 9), materials on top of one another to effectvely build up the final result. It's very much the same as using layers in PS....so those of you that use PS should know how easy it is to build a 'composite' image by having different 'layers'...and that you can 'hide' certain parts of those layers by using a mask.....it's the same here....each material can have it's own 'mask' to hide parts of it.


The Base layer:
A standard VRayMtl with nothing more than a diffuse colour.




The Holes:
The base layer material has an 'aopacity' map applied to it to produce nice clean 'holes'. This is great for keeping the poly count extremely low, but the downside is that it works only on single polygons...in other words, to get any 'depth' to the holes would require displacement maps. Initially the bottom polygon of the board was removed so that it was clearer to see through the holes. This was abandoned later and the polygon replaced.....the holes would be almost blocked by the added components anyway and any others could simply be filled with solder....thats my excuse and I'm sticking to it.




The Solder Layer.
A new VRayMtl was created for the solder. This was then added to the VRayBlend material by drag and drop. Without any mask applied the solder layer looks like this:




The Solder Mask:
I needed to now add a mask to this layer to only show the solder where it needs to be. This 'mask' is added to the mask slot on the solder material in the VRayBlend material.




As you can see the 'holes' are now replaced with the solder and are effectively filled in. This is because the solder material is literally placed on top of the base layer, which means that I needed to add the same 'opacity' map to the solder material as well. With the same 'opacity' map for the holes applied to the solder material we get this:




The 'Green' Layer:
This green layer is a very thin transparent shiny film that covers virtually the entire surface of the board.
This 'green' layer is particularly tricky to get right. One way could be to create a green 'glass' material by using a fog colour or refract colour, but this may not be ideal when it comes to render time. An alternative would be to make the material 'opaque' and use the colour swatch in the Blend layer to control it's opacity. It needs to be thin enough to show the solder 'tracks' underneath, yet thick enough to keep it's properties.....this took a lot of experimenting before finally getting somewhere near....it could still do with a tweak.




The 'green' Mask:
I originally decided to use the 'mask' to control the opacity of this 'green' layer, as well as masking the layer, and I think the map above shows this idea. This was also abandoned in favour of using the colour swatch in the Blend layer to control the opacity. This made things a lot simpler, (in hindsight), as now the 'mask' need only be a black and white image...no 'grey' area's as it were. With the Mask applied and the opacity set to around 128 this was the result. Again, the 'opacity' map for the holes was added to the 'opacity' slot for the 'green' material.




The Print Layer:
I again changed my technique with this layer. usually the printing on these boards does not have any reflective quality and is just a matt white print....due to the fact it's usually silk-screen printed on the actual board. Originally I included the reflection map for the print in with the mask with the idea to add it to the 'green' layer as a diffuse map, but as you can see from the maps above this starts getting a bit fiddly. A better way would be to just create a matt white material and add it to the Blend layers as another material. The material can then handle the reflection of the print, leaving the mask to just do it's thing and not worry about reflections. The print layer is really boring but here it is anyway.




The Print Mask:
With the mask added to the print layer in the Blend material it all becomes clear what's going on....and worth the effort of all that tweaking.




So there you have it. Thinking about how a PCB board is actually produced...in layers....and adopting the same technique here certainly made life a little easier. To be honest the hardest part was producing the maps in PS....but with a good ref image to start with this again was made much easier than it could have been. Hopefully it's a reasonable likeness to the original.

The thought of adding components to the board had crossed my mind several times, but as this was an excercise in materials and not an actual project as such, this idea remained just that.....an idea.....until someone else mentioned it!!!!!!Darn you!!!!!

Not one to resist a challenge, It had to be done. Ok, I've rushed it because of time limitations but it's nice to turn something 'experimental' into a finished, (nearly), piece of work. The next images are all I've done since the one above with the components added. I don't think there is any need for explanations on these, they are renders of a un-polished project...errors and omissions included....the whole lot......that's all.




























Thanks for watching.



Regards.

[Fisher]

Amazing. Thank you for explaining your 3ds Jedi ninja skills, Master Yoda. My mind got twisted into a few torus knots while reading about all the maps and opacity tweaking, but the end result makes everything better.

What kind of render times are you getting out of this? Should be fairly short, eh? And for the quality.... gahdamn!

So I haven't seen this in the finished work section. What are the plans for the rest of it?

Very impressive, sir.

[MrTom]

Originally Posted by Fisher

Amazing. Thank you for explaining your 3ds Jedi ninja skills, Master Yoda. My mind got twisted into a few torus knots while reading about all the maps and opacity tweaking, but the end result makes everything better.

Thanks mate, appreciated. It actually sounds far more complicated than it really is....there is no easy way to explain it without using the word 'map' a million times. As you know, materials can get very complex, especially when using maps within maps.....there see what I mean...thats three times already!

This one material, now only uses three of those maps above, but they are used several times and for differnet things......a map is a map when all said and done....only when you use it for something does it get a name.

What kind of render times are you getting out of this? Should be fairly short, eh? And for the quality.... gahdamn!

Well, as you know I'm only using a lappy, but for this I did get my little render farm set-up. The problem with the image is all the blurry reflections in the different metals, which will increase render times 10 fold in the blink of an eye....even with interpolation on! All these renders have been done with the lowest possible quality settings too....I'd hate to think how long higher quality settings would take.

For the last bunch of pics each was around 20 mins for GI calculation and about 3 mins to render....I've no idea if thats good or bad. My 'farm' consists of 3 machines, 2 lappies and a PC. 1 lappy is 3Ghz (Dual core), with 2Gb mem, the other is 1.5Ghz with 1Gb mem and the PC is 1.8Ghz with 1Gb mem. So a total speed of 6.3Ghz, mem of 4Gb and effectively 4 cpu's. I know it doesn't quite work like that but thats the s.p. if it helps.

...What are the plans for the rest of it?

Well the initial plan was just an excercise in using the VRayBlend material and look where it is now! LOL. No further plans for it at the moment...my lappy could'nt take much more anyway, all the objects here are VRay proxies as it is, and I had a viewport issue which I think was borne from a mapping problem in a material....which didn't help.

Anyway, thanks for taking a look and your for comments.

Regards.

[Jelmer]

cool stuff, quite an interesting way to go about the texturing, I guess you just used different diffuse colours and material settings for each "layer"? it's a lot more organised than adding colour to one map for sure. Awesome amount of detail in that last render too, if you can get the right materials and render I'm sure most people won't know it's a render :P.

edit: Oops, I didn't see the second page when I wrote this, kind of made my post useless now.. It's looking great, only thing you could change maybe are the colours of the objects on top, especially the blue and red ones are a bit more saturated in the photo if you're trying to go for photo realism.. Of course there are a few more things like some noise and camera effects like that which could make it even more realistic, but yeah, respect for getting it this far mate!

btw, sagethumbs seems quite useful, but I've just re-installed my computer and would like to keep it running smoothly, so my question is, does it affect performance a lot?

[MrTom]

Thanks Jelmer, appreciated.....(not sure where this 'second page' is though.....)

As to sagethumbs, well no, not at all. All it does is to add the shell extensions into windows to allow explorer to show many more types of image file as thumbnails.

The option to show a thumbnail in the right-click menu can be turned off, but it takes so little resources that the difference is neglegible.

The file conversion part is applied to one file at a time, is extremely quick and only initiates when you want it to....so again, no noticable difference in performance.

The only time you will notice any difference is when you open a folder with many files all of a different type.....and then ask it to display as thumbnails...(in explorer that is). Obviously your PC will have more work to do as it can now display more files as thumbnails....but this is no different to any other task you ask of your PC.....the more it has to do the slower it will appear to be.

Think of it as adding a few more paragraphs of text to the back page of book....the book is still the same weight and size, it still has the same amount of pages and yet it contains so much more information......yes it will take a little longer to read it but then you'd expect it to.

If you find it useful then I'd use it.......I do and well...I do!

Regards.