Grant Warwick- Mastering Vray: Material Ideas Needed.

[tricky]

I haven't gone through all of this thread yet but it seems a great potential resource. Is there a site I can look at with all of these textures visible in one place. We'd certainly be interested in a purchase, but it just depends on how many 'architectural' materials are in the library. (we don't really need baked bean sauce materials - as nice as they are! - we need different metals, brushed stainless steel, painted timber work, carpets, ceramic tiles, glass blocks, terracotta panels, frosted glass, etched glass, slate roofs etc).

[JezUK]

Thanks Grant,

I know what you mean, but at the same time, it's all a learning experience - for example, courses I purchased some time ago were tricky for me, and I felt overwhelmed. Did them recently and they felt fantastic (I kinda knew them so it was a case of sitting back and enjoying the show)....

But you definitely have the teaching ability - please keep those coming - I'd definitely pay for videos I knew were created by yourself

Regarding purchasing materials from you - I'd be happy to do that, but as Richard says, I'd need to see them in one place. I'd be even more interested in learning how you created them (more videos !)

A question I do have for you Grant - in your videos you mention 'termination' or 'terminator' - please can you explain what you mean by that. Your training is the only 'formal' training I've ever had in modelling so I'd like to understand what you mean.

And Grant...... re modelling.... are there any basic simple rules that you could give us learners - for example, I'd only very recently learnt that you should make 'quads' and not 'triangles' in your meshes - this is only something I picked up but don't really know why this is a good rule as such. Do you have a 'top ten' rules of do's and don'ts ?? ?? (e.g. quads, terminators etc !) - sorry, yes I know..... off topic

[Donald2B]

Working full time at Cream now so no need for a freelance website. Freelancing is pretty dog shit nowadays anyway lol.

Poly modeling. It took longer than expected but I've been modeling chocolate / liquid for years now so it feels natural. I've never done a print job that actually used a realflow sim.

No worries man. I got sick and tired of dumb asses posting pricy hard surface tutorials to the community that effectively jumped straight to complex shapes without giving any understanding of what modeling actually is. How it works and the laws behind it.
It actually infuriated me pretty badly, I could drop a few names but it's not worth it.

All in the UV mapping I guess. That model is nurbs so it automatically has clean UV's. (From a tiling point of view anyway)

Good ol days! Hardstyle music while hard surface modeling.

Are any of you interested in pre purchasing the shaders I do have?

Grant,

I am definitely interested in a pre-purchase of the existing materials. Would they come setup in your existing scene that you have been showcasing them in?

I just hope that doesn't negate the monumental effort of the tutorials. Having jumped around a lot with the various projects, we are now refocusing on different markets and I would LOVE to get more in-depth material / shader theory, ideas and workflow habits from others. I like the ideas that you were providing and would love the opportunity to purchase the tutorials once finished.

Cheers!

[grantwarwick]

Thanks Grant,

I know what you mean, but at the same time, it's all a learning experience - for example, courses I purchased some time ago were tricky for me, and I felt overwhelmed. Did them recently and they felt fantastic (I kinda knew them so it was a case of sitting back and enjoying the show)....

But you definitely have the teaching ability - please keep those coming - I'd definitely pay for videos I knew were created by yourself

Regarding purchasing materials from you - I'd be happy to do that, but as Richard says, I'd need to see them in one place. I'd be even more interested in learning how you created them (more videos !)

A question I do have for you Grant - in your videos you mention 'termination' or 'terminator' - please can you explain what you mean by that. Your training is the only 'formal' training I've ever had in modelling so I'd like to understand what you mean.

And Grant...... re modelling.... are there any basic simple rules that you could give us learners - for example, I'd only very recently learnt that you should make 'quads' and not 'triangles' in your meshes - this is only something I picked up but don't really know why this is a good rule as such. Do you have a 'top ten' rules of do's and don'ts ?? ?? (e.g. quads, terminators etc !) - sorry, yes I know..... off topic

You'll never see me sell a modeling video. I'm too passionate about it (or was). I don't make a living modeling anymore and don't want to, I think I perfected how to model hard surface quickly and it's time to move on.
I wouldn't say I have teaching ability, but I can definitely break things down into their most basic forms. True teaching ability, I believe is figuring out how to motivate one to learn themselves. Modeling is not hard by any means but you need to "see" the laws behind how it works.

As for termination, I am merely referring to ending an edgeloop.
The whole "we must make everything quads" is complete bullshit. No studio I've ever heard has that law. I remember once we needed to keep some meshes quadified for simulation but generally it's a giant crock of shit. I have 5,6,7,8,952 sided polys in all my character models, whatever subdivides "cleanly" goes. When you subdivide a mesh it makes it quads anyway so just do whatever works. In fact I've said it many times but 5+ sided faces can produce really interesting curves if controlled.

I'll try and formalise the shaders I have with screenshots. Of course my shader scene would be included with all the different light rigs.

I haven't gone through all of this thread yet but it seems a great potential resource. Is there a site I can look at with all of these textures visible in one place. We'd certainly be interested in a purchase, but it just depends on how many 'architectural' materials are in the library. (we don't really need baked bean sauce materials - as nice as they are! - we need different metals, brushed stainless steel, painted timber work, carpets, ceramic tiles, glass blocks, terracotta panels, frosted glass, etched glass, slate roofs etc).

I'm not an arch vis artist but the general rule is that you should be able to easily modify the shaders to suite your purpose, knowing they have lots of procedural detail. We just did an arch vis job here and it went extremely smooth, shading wise, simply using 5-6 of my shaders. It can always be better but it was a good practical test.

Grant do you mean the shaders itself or already parts of the tutorial?

The shaders. I'm not happy with the tutorials yet.

Grant,

I am definitely interested in a pre-purchase of the existing materials. Would they come setup in your existing scene that you have been showcasing them in?

I just hope that doesn't negate the monumental effort of the tutorials. Having jumped around a lot with the various projects, we are now refocusing on different markets and I would LOVE to get more in-depth material / shader theory, ideas and workflow habits from others. I like the ideas that you were providing and would love the opportunity to purchase the tutorials once finished.

Cheers!

Thanks, but when it comes to the tutorials, I dno, guess I'm extremely picky due to all the utter shit that gets spewed onto the scene but I really do need to just get a free starter tutorial up.

[Donald2B]

Thanks for the update Grant!

I think that sounds great. Just getting the starter scenes out there, we could start asking questions and make it less about a formal tutorial but more about a learning exercise between those who purchased the pack. I've been disappointed in some of the more recent material / shader setup tutorials that I have either purchased or part of a membership. I've got the basics, and I get some of the more complex ideas. I just need some more exposure to a more production friendly approach.

Thanks again for sharing your knowledge. I still keep pushing your modeling fundamentals video to most of my modelers. Such a great resource, because of the heavy theory based ideology.

[cheerioboy]

I'm still interested in the shaders, and especially the scenes you're testing them in! It might work well to release the shaders sooner so people can play with them and eventually any tutorials can supplement in helping explain your process in shader building.

[kosso_olli]

Grant, can your anodized and brushed aluminium or silver be tweaked to produce a circular brushed pattern? Like found on watches, rims etc?

[JezUK]

Coconut

[Raven]

Hey Grant

Your thoughts on frosted glass.

Like this challenge
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=6614442

[grantwarwick]

Hey Kosso, yes it can, but can you give me an example of what you're after so I can make the aniso map.

Honestly, looking at those tests, it's hard to say anything without a real photo of that dragon with a frosted glass material.

Back on a caramel job but it needed a complete rework due to the thick nature of it.

[stevesideas]

Love this shader ! Looks well tasty !

Hey Kosso, yes it can, but can you give me an example of what you're after so I can make the aniso map.

Honestly, looking at those tests, it's hard to say anything without a real photo of that dragon with a frosted glass material.

Back on a caramel job but it needed a complete rework due to the thick nature of it.

[kosso_olli]

Hey Kosso, yes it can, but can you give me an example of what you're after so I can make the aniso map.

Grant,
thanks for the answer. Attached you can find some reference images of what I am after. To be honest, the rims in the example look pretty bold, but the techique is used on modern cars as well, mostly on the spokes.



The spun pattern on a cog of a watch looks somewhat similar to that on the wheels, but because of the small size of the cogs it looks much stronger. I already made a material like this, but I often got artifacts because of some filtering of the maps going on. The pattern looked very irregular because of this. Maybe you have an idea.

[4th-Child]

Hey Grant I'd be interested to see your candle wax shader set up if you have got it ready? Im looking into making something in maya that required some cg candle replacements right now ive been doing some test. but interedted to see what you have come up with

[grantwarwick]

Making progress, not a lot of time to reply atm

[jasonhuang1115]

Hey Grant, would you consider to make these materials compatible with VRmats (or Vismats) format introduced in Vray 3.0 so that they can be used across multiple host applications?