UV-Spot Effect

Click here if you never heard about UV-Spot or UV coating, to get a quick introduction to the effect. This effect is quite popular for business cards and book covers, so let’s try to create it in Boxshot.

We’ll be making a business card using this texture:

And we want our uv-spot decoration to be this one:

Ready? right-click the two images and save them to your computer, and let’s start!

Make a simple business card

Run Boxshot and drop a simple business card shape into the scene:

Then drag the main image onto the card, click the “Fit to images” button, and adjust the camera to fit the card onto the screen:

Adjust reflection

Now you need to make some changes to the default business card material:

Here’s what you need to do:

turn the raytraced reflection option on
increase the reflection level to about 20
remove the reflection texture from the material

This makes the card a little reflective. Use the environment reflection offset controls and the camera position to make a nice glossy gradient on the shape, as in the image above.

That’s how you usually do business cards in Boxshot. But we’ll go further with our uv coating mask.

Add UV-Spot effect

The effect itself is all about rough and smooth surfaces. We use blur in Boxshot to make the surface rough, so let’s set the reflection blur to 70 and render our card. As the draft renderer doesn’t take the samples number into account, we’ll switch to production rendering:

Here’s how the same card looks with blur set to 5:

So basically all we need is to simulate uv-spot effect is to make some parts of the card smooth and glossy and other parts rough. Here comes the second texture - the uv-spot mask we mentioned above. Let’s load it into the reflection blur slot and set the blur level back to 70:

Looks interesting, right? The black parts of the uv-spot mask give us a completely glossy surface, while the white ones give us a rough surface: the texture brightness is multiplied to the blur level value and used as a new blur level for each point on the card.

Now we need to invert the uv-spot mask to make the text glossy instead and then add the main “the boss” text to it, to make it glossy as well. Here’s the new uv-mask:

Finally, load the new mask into the “blur mask” slot and render the uv-coated card:

Not that difficult, right?

Further improvements

The uv-coated ornament has a strong and sharp reflection, so you may want to reduce it a bit. To do so you need to make the black parts of the uv-spot mask gray. Here is the new mask:

Notice that the letters are now gray instead of black. Let’s render the card again using the new uv-spot mask:

Now it looks much better. Let’s add some bump to make the coated text more visible. We’ll need our initial black uv-spot texture with the main text and some blur:

Load this texture into the “bump” slot of the material and render the card again:

It’s that easy :)

That’s all

OK, so you’ve just learned how to use reflection blur, blur masks and bump to create uv coating effect in Boxshot. Why don’t you try to make your own material now?