Mouse pad texture - a little like asphalt

[cum. m+d]

Hey guys, I am so sorry, this is probably the noobest question around but it is trickier than i thought.
I thought this texture would be simple to execute. But it is tougher than I'd expect. Is there a way to generate a shader that would look good from a distance and close up as well.

Its a mouse pad texture. For starters, I can't even find a procedural noise that looks correct. And also when you render. It doesn't look the same into the distance. No noise shader in maya generates a consistent noise pattern that doesn't eventually look tiled. Not to mention filtering probably changes the texture too.

Any ideas?




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[glorybound]

will you get that close? Maybe, just scan a mouse pad.

[joconnell]

The issue you get is that it looks like grain or noise depending on the distance, so the anti aliaser will try and use more samples on it and gradually smooth it out. If you've got animation to do, expect it to shimmer quite a bit due to the individual sparkles shifting between pixels too. A good be might be the vray car paint material or the flakes map from it. There are methods being looked at but they're hard to get stable in terms of flicker, very memory intensive and possibly quite far off too in terms of something working making it out for max or maya.

[cum. m+d]

Scans aren't working because there is a reflective coat on it. However, shimmer might actually be okay. The artifacting might make it look real. Is there a particular noise map (fractal etc etc.) that can reproduce this without looking tiled though? I find it funny that I can't replicate this surface with noise shaders for reflection and bump map.

I tried using flakes. It doesn't give the same effect that the mouse does. It looks faked unfortunately. No other suggestions? And yes, I believe the camera might fly real close for a bit.

[Neilg]

each of those flakes is like a different material right? some black soft looking pieces, some shinier grey (maybe a range?), and the more reflective white - i'd make each of these separate and use a vrayblend material with high contrast noise maps as masks to get them evenly spread. It'll be slower to render but so much faster to set up, and easier to adjust. with a more subtle larger scale noise in each of those to add some slight randomization to the diffuse/reflection I think you're good.

[bigbossfr]

Add a fractal node into your noise 2d texture placement (UV cood) to remove the pattern : http://www.sigillarium.com/blog/lang/en/318/

[cum. m+d]

Hello Deex,

Thank you for the link. The interesting thing is that when I used a 2D maya fractal and mapped that into color. Tiled it 20 followed by 100 times. There is no noticeable tiling like I remembered getting in the past. Has something changed in Vray 3.0 and this is no longer an issue?