Simple materials tut

[BBB3]

Hi guys. Just a quick line to point to a tutorial about basic material setups in Vray. This is the first in a series that will look at increasingly complex setups, starting with the single-layer mats used to shade my Eames Photoshoot scene. So nothing too advanced yet, but may still be useful if you need simple setups that render fast for relatively everyday mats. This one covers rugged plastic, aged chrome, scratched rough metal, painted steel, vintage fibreglass.

Check it out here.

[Morne]

Cool thanks a lot. Looking forward to the next one!

[paolo242]

thank you so much! great work and thanks again for sharing...

[zeronove]

thanks a lot for sharing your ideas

[Pixelcon]

Loved reading it this morning when I got to work! Thanks a million! I'd love to get the test scene too!

[simmsimaging]

Great tutorial Bertrand. My approach to materials is very similar, although I do tend to use layered materials pretty freely as a means of adding subtle variation/detail.

A couple thoughts: I understand very well why you will use multiple versions of a single map in different slots rather than use Color Correction etc. I wish there were more powerful tools for image manipulation within Max. I would kill for a Photoshop-like "Curve Shader" that you could embed bitmaps in, for example. A "gaussian blur" would be nice too. I'm guessing you would agree?

For myself I still try to use the Max tools as much as possible in order to be able to make testing variations and fine-tuning material properties faster within Max, and also to maximize instancing of maps. I find instancing very handy as a workflow tool even more than as a memory saver: makes it much easier for me to keep track of small changes to things like tiling/size, rotations, offsets etc. and makes it easier to adjust materials for different scales/ render resolutions.

One thing I do a lot, when not able to instance maps, or when using sets of related but different maps (e.g spec map, normal map) is to use the Slate editor to wire common parameters together using a Linear Float Controller. That way when I change the tiling of the diffuse map, for example, it will automatically change the tiling for all the related maps at the same time. It takes a bit longer to setup, but it makes fine tuning changes very fast, and reduces the chances of me accidentally changing one incorrectly or forgetting to adjust one out of a set.

Looking forward to seeing the rest of your tutorials - your materials are always awesome!
/b

[sandykoufax]

Thank you so much for nice tutorial!

[ajroane]

One thing I do a lot, when not able to instance maps, or when using sets of related but different maps (e.g spec map, normal map) is to use the Slate editor to wire common parameters together using a Linear Float Controller. That way when I change the tiling of the diffuse map, for example, it will automatically change the tiling for all the related maps at the same time. It takes a bit longer to setup, but it makes fine tuning changes very fast, and reduces the chances of me accidentally changing one incorrectly or forgetting to adjust one out of a set.
/b

That sounds really useful, I'm going to try it out. Thanks!

- Andrew

[joconnell]

Yep, the output map is a tiny bit limited but something I use a huge amount. Generally as a way of taking a diffuse map and treating it to get what I want for a spec or ref map. I must admit the in built max colour correct map is awful, the hue and saturation controls seem to be very prone to breaking colours in a way that Cuneyt Ozdas' colour correct map does not. I'd love a much better colour correct option with curves, a histogram and hue / sat built in. I'd love to get to a level where I could program it myself but I can't see that happening within the year!

On a side note, I've just started a job where I'll have to do a tonne of virtual environments so I've bought Bertrand's chicago loft scene. Definitely nasty in terms of render times but great to get an insight into how he sets up his scenes! There's a loooooooot of care put into the materials with each being fairly delicately tweaked and it's interesting to see you use the map spinners rather than using output values of the maps instead - perhaps it's actually a quicker method to tweak, especially in the case of things like glossiness maps. I want to render a few frames but they're reeeeallly nasty on my home computer so maybe it's time to look at that script to control glossy samples based on glossy values or in your case, map spinner amount!