New Thin Film

[Jiri.Matys]

Hi,

I tried Thin Film efect and I am little bit confused. I hope for some more parameters but mainly when I plug some texture to Thickness it looks like it has really weird impact and nothing we would expect.

[Jiri.Matys]

I want to add fingerprints and/or vraydirt to thickness parameter to drive color variation with the texture but it doesnt work. How can I achieve this effect? Seems there is no other way.

[nicklas_byriel]

Just tried messing around with Thin Film as well..
It works fine with setting values like 500 nm thickness and IOR 1.6 or whatever.
However if i leave those settings, and then add a map to Thin Film Thickness, it just looks as if it has a thickness of 0 nm. Map in this case was a noise going from black to white.

Then i tried adding a VRayColor map while having interactive render going, changed the color from grey to black to white, still the same result.. Then i tried RGB instead, going blue, red, green, yellow... still nothing..
Then i figured i'd try 32 bit values, going 1.000 red 2.000 red then 10 then 100 then 500 - trying this on all values basically, exactly the same result every time (as if its 0 thickness)

So what kind of map is expected to determine thickness? or maybe it's a bug.

[yolov]

I'm not sure you can create a finger-print-like effect.
The thin film is best suited for things like soap bubbles, oil spills, iridescent plastics or colored chrome-like metal welds.

Here's a few examples made by our Maya team that only use the Thin Film IOR and Thickness parameters:


And here's a quick and dirty setup from playing around with it to create an oil spill in water:
Not textured:


And using some ramp textures with noise to create a more realistic effect:




Here's how the shading network looks like:


I've used the wave and noise functions of the ramps.
Then the ramp that goes into the thickness has two points with values of 700 and 800.
The ramp that goes into the Thin Film IOR has two points with values of 1.3 and 1.6.

Here's a screen grab of the oil spill material parameters:

[Jiri.Matys]

But this is 3ds max forum. This is not what we pointing. There is a texture slot for thickness in 3ds max. But seems it doesnt work.

[nicklas_byriel]

yolov really cool!
I tried using something like a Gradient Ramp, and giving the flags output nodes as textures setting their value between 300 and 800 - again, no matter what values have set on any type of map i've tried so far, has generated any result in varying thickness - it's always 0, unless i dont use a map, and just set the thickness to something like 500 (but the whole point of this thread, is that nothing seems to happen when using a map to control thickness)

[yolov]

I just played on top of what petya.georgieva from the Maya team made for us.
Just wanted to showcase some results from messing around with it in Maya.

[JonasNöll]

Hi,

I tried Thin Film efect and I am little bit confused. I hope for some more parameters but mainly when I plug some texture to Thickness it looks like it has really weird impact and nothing we would expect.

Hi, same feeling for me, couldn't really figure out how it was intended to be used so far. Too little options to control what is happening and results seem to be very unpredictable and don't seem to be reacting to any kind of map inputs in the way you would expect. It mainly seems to tint the reflections overall. Is there anywhere where we could see how this can be controlled?

Edit: Just as an idea, wouldn't it make more sense to integrate this into the "Coat" section instead of having another tab? Isn't it basically just a coat layer that just offsets the reflection color a little bit? I could imagine it just like the "Abbe" checkbox in the refraction, to have a "Thinfilm" checkbox in the coat layer...

[Jiri.Matys]

Hi, same feeling for me, couldn't really figure out how it was intended to be used so far. Too little options to control what is happening and results seem to be very unpredictable and don't seem to be reacting to any kind of map inputs in the way you would expect. It mainly seems to tint the reflections overall. Is there anywhere where we could see how this can be controlled?

Edit: Just as an idea, wouldn't it make more sense to integrate this into the "Coat" section instead of having another tab? Isn't it basically just a coat layer that just offsets the reflection color a little bit? I could imagine it just like the "Abbe" checkbox in the refraction, to have a "Thinfilm" checkbox in the coat layer...

It is a bug. There is a clarification:
https://forums.chaos.com/forum/v-ray...d-improvements

[Jiri.Matys]

Maybe some more settings would be nice for Thin Film for creative control. I miss min and max thickness and some hue/saturation settings. And maybe entering and leaving IOR. But now I really want to try it with textures. I want to do some cool stuff like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSsEHFA4bqk

[JonasNöll]

Maybe some more settings would be nice for Thin Film for creative control. I miss min and max thickness and some hue/saturation settings. And maybe entering and leaving IOR. But now I really want to try it with textures. I want to do some cool stuff like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSsEHFA4bqk

There was this thinfilm OSL that has those controls. Used it a few times, it was quite weird to use in a way but you could get some decent effects.
https://docs.chaos.com/display/OSLSh...in+Film+Shader

[Jiri.Matys]

I used Siger Shader Thin Film plugin few times which is good. But I prefer to have those effects built in.