Flake Material Pre-Calculation Time and Caching

[sdelalla]

Hello!

I have a question regarding the flake material. Right now we are using it on a shader (very simple blend material) and are getting the following times for pre calculation:

512: 2 seconds
1024: 10 seconds
2048: 40 seconds
4096: 160 seconds

Unfortunately at the lower map sizes like 512 or 1024 there is a noticeable tiling pattern. Going up to 2048 fixes this, but we lose the interactivity of the render due to the high pre-calc times. Is there any way to bake the flake map out to avoid the precalc time? Setting the shader to simple helped a lot, but the quality was not good enough for the desired result.

We are actively looking into the new Stochastic Flake material as well, maybe this is the best solution? Thank you for the help.

[asen.atanasov]

Hi,

this is the way the car paint material works. The only way to avoid tiling is to increase the texture size. Actually, your measurements are fitting the theory surprisingly well! Each time you double the texture size, its pixels quadruples, hence the time to process them.

Stochastic flakes on the other side don't have pre calculation step. They also do not show tiling artifacts. The result is computed entirely on the fly. I can't say how fast it will be for your scenes, but your feedback will be very valuable for us. In the future we plan to plug the stochastic flakes directly in the car paint material, but before that we want to hear more from our users.

So I will do my best to answer any questions regarding the stochastic material.

Best regards,
Asen

[sdelalla]

This sounds great. We are trying to replicate our result we got on the stochastic material now, and will update when we have some feedback regarding the process.

As for the original flake material, is there any way to cache the map and save the data to prevent re-doing the calculation every render?

[vlado]

Technically it's possible to cache the map, but we haven't done that so far. If you can get things working with the stochastic flakes material it would be great, otherwise we'll try to figure our something else.

Best regards,
Vlado

[sdelalla]

Hey Guys,

I wanted to loop back to this and give some feedback. The stochastic flake material has so proved very helpful in a lot of tests for us, and has been rolled out in production on certain assets.

A feature I do wish that we could have was a black and white version of the stochastic flake that we could use as a mask between two materials. Is this possible?

Thank you.

[asen.atanasov]

Hi,
thank you for tour feedback! What is your idea? To have a texture that evaluates to white when there are flakes, and black where there are no flakes? We can certainly implement such a texture. Do you think it's good to be a separate texture or somehow integrated to the material?

Best regards,
Asen

[sdelalla]

Yes, your description is exactly what I was thinking.

I do think that this feature would be best as a separate texture, since it will be very easy to use in a single vray material in slots like reflection glossiness or bump, but then also as a blend material mask as well to combine two shaders. The speed and detail of the flake has proven really nice, and I think it will be extremely useful as a procedural texture in this way.

Thank you!

[asen.atanasov]

Maybe not just white where there are flakes, because usually there are some flakes in each pixel, but number of flakes per pixel? We will discuss this option.

Best regards,
Asen