I would pay for material presets

[Morne]

Hi Chaosgroup

This has been mentioned a thousand times. I want material presets for VRay that COMES WITH VRAY!. Doesn't even have to be many of them. I would pay to get Chaosgroup material presets

3 or 4 different plastics
10 or so different metals
5 or so different glass
car paint

get the picture?

I don't want to spend time splitting the monkeys from the pros at vraymaterials.de when it won't help since I'm a monkey myself. I don't want to buy vray materials from anybody other than chaosgroup.

[jacksc02]

Have you looked at the Evermotion materials packs?
They have everything you have asked for.

[trick]

http://www.siger.lt/products/shaders_vpreset_pro.php

Maybe this is something for you...they are on sale until july 1st ! Maybe Chaosgroup can "certify" them so you can buy them

[plastic_]

in the other thread you asked about the perfect formula for contrast. now material presets.

you have to understand that presets probably wont work as you expect.

you can take the best metal shader in the world and place it in your scene. it will look like crap, because the environment isn't there.

presets only work if you build your scene in exactly the same way as the author of the preset. what you can do is taking apart some evermotion scene, and compose your own objects into it, with the evermotion shaders.

but from what i've seen, the evermotion scenes are not very good. they aren't optimised at all, use insane settings and polycount.

the only right way is learning and doing everything from scratch, in my opinion.

[jujubee]

I do agree with him - I think Vray could be even a better product if it shipped with a bunch of material presets - but then you run into the problem of everyone getting a little better at using the program and requiring less skill. The SSS presets seemed like a good start. Ultimately, it's still good to know how to use and make your own.

I think Jackson is referring to the Evermotion materials themselves (not the interiors, exteriors or models.)

But yeah, Evermotion scenes are made from a variety of different artists. I always noticed that their models aren't highly optimized and their material subdivisions are crazy high.

I once tried an artist who I thought had an excellent portfolio. So he took one of my models, textured it, and placed it in a scene. It turned out to be quite amazing. But then the arch asked him to change the camera angle and he completely went nuts. Come to find out, the 'artist' was just using an Evermotion scene with its settings however that scene only worked at that one specific angle.

Needless to say, I haven't used the 'artist' since.

I get a lot of resumes each day (3-5), and quite honestly 85% don't use good GI and 95% of the time materials tile. I see more and more Evermotion models and libraries appearing and spot them from a mile away - and while they're fine for filling a complicated scene on a live project, I tend to give those artists that use them a lot less respect. And if I ever see an Evermotion interior or exterior scene recycled, I'll never consider using them at all.

I just hope they're not stupid enough to try to fool a developer or architect on a 'live' project.

[Morne]

you see this is the thing. How you suppose to learn how to do it if there are no reference that explains in detail what is what? How can you learn from something like evermotion if countless people say there settings are insane etc. The siger mats looks pretty good. How does your scene and unit scale effect the settings in your material? What does this button do, what does that button do? Yes experimenting is fine if you're a student with nothing to do. In the real world I'm not getting any younger. The "vray complete guide" from that italian guy is pretty good(bought it and learning cool stuff, didn't get to material section yet), but it is something that chaos was suppose to do from the beginning and sell WITH vray. I'm just venting because I'm frustrated with current personal project.

[simmsimaging]

While I'm not exactly completely on board with your preset request, I really do feel your pain on the time issue. I'm pretty weary of always hearing that throwing time at CG problems is the answer. It may well be true most of the time, but *anything* that can shave some of that time off is worth a look and should not be dismissed out of hand. I'm with you: I don't have a spare 5 minutes most days, and there are always about 6 hours worth of small and large things to spend time learning in CG. It's pretty endless.

Material presets may not be the ultimate answer, but they have a place and utility. They are probably one of the most efficient ways to learn how things work. Anyway, most of the other render engines I have worked with include some - mental ray being an obvious example - and I think users appreciate them.

b

[rmejia]

I think this could be useful to anybody starting out. At this point I would probably not use it. I already have a couple of mat libraries with my own custom mats which is what I use. I remember using the presets though, when I used scanline around 9 years ago and the times I tried out MR. Maybe a new VRayArchMtl with similar presets to what the other two default render engines Max has. Although if there was a list to vote on new features, this would be lower in my list, but I understand if others feel this is important. I can definately see the usefulness for helping people starting out save some time when starting materials from scratch, but I don't think it's a critical need.

One really great thing about V-Ray is that there is a lot of stuff out there to fill in this and other needs (Evermotion, http://www.vray-materials.de/, and a couple of other websites). In this aspect V-Ray beats out other render engines. It might not have the presets but there are vast collections of materials already out there which are more complete than anything simple presets could offer.

[Morne]

One really great thing about V-Ray is that there is a lot of stuff out there to fill in this and other needs (Evermotion, http://www.vray-materials.de/, and a couple of other websites). In this aspect V-Ray beats out other render engines. It might not have the presets but there are vast collections of materials already out there which are more complete than anything simple presets could offer.

The problem I have with this is like I mentioned. The stuff is not "certified" by chaosgroup, and they might work very well, but who's to say that it is fine tuned for speed, quality, accuracy etc. I mean I've seen these so called shaders you can buy. How you suppose to learn anything from a library of shaders that has 20 diffrent frosted glass samples, that all look the same?

I'm not saying I would use presets all the time. I'm saying I would learn from them to make my own stuff better.

[joconnell]

Certification is a difficult one - the issue is so many things can have an impact on the quality of a material when it's in a different scene that it's difficult to tell what the best settings are for it's samples and so on - You could buy a car paint material for example and put it into a really simple scene lit only by a skylight and while it'd be nice and clean with low samples it'd probably be flat and boring. The same material put into a scene with lots of different lights in an interior or lit by a hdri would probably look an awful lot better but be much grainier. Shiny materials are slightly annoying to get your head around since it's not the material settings that makes the object look good, it's how interesting the environment around the object for the material to reflect is. On optimisation, again you're going to get different results in terms of cleanness depending on how complex the lighting and reflections are in your scene - it's hard to choose one sample setting for the material that'll work in all cases - for example is the object going to be small in the background or right up close to camera? You might be able to get away with smaller sample numbers in one scene and need far higher to get a good result in another.

[Da_elf]

im curious.... you would pay for the materials if chaos did them but not if others did them..... now i do know that chaos wrote vray. but that that mean the inbetween all the bg fixes and new features they are working on that they have time to fiddle with it and figure out the perfect looking gold shader?

[Morne]

I feel I have a BWM without the steering wheel

[simmsimaging]

You are just caught in what I think is a perpetual 3-way priority tug-of-war with CG users and developers. There is ease of use, realism, and speed optimization. It's kind of a "pick any two" kind of problem, as each one needs something a bit different and often mutually excusive at that, and each one is more important for different people at different times.

You see the mat preset issue as missing a steering wheel, and some of the other users see it as asking to be supplied with a driver along with your car - but there is no right answer and I think that makes it very hard for guys like Vlado to figure out what is the best thing to focus their time on.

That said, I have to agree that material presets probably ain't it though - for the simple reason that materials are something you at least *can* get elsewhere, but if Vlado/Chaos spend time on that then no one is going to be developing the new features of Vray and enhancing/bug fixing what's already there. It's just the best use of resources, but it's all just my POV.

b

[rmejia]

The problem I have with this is like I mentioned. The stuff is not "certified" by chaosgroup, and they might work very well, but who's to say that it is fine tuned for speed, quality, accuracy etc.

Certification would be nice. I don't use Maxwell but have browsed over their website and like the fact that they have a download area on their site, with things like materials (http://mxmgallery.maxwellrender.com/) done by certified users. I'm not sure what a certified user is, but it being on the official website does make it seem more legit. In http://www.vray-materials.de/ I usually sort by rating, but there is tons of junk over there since basically anybody can upload anything.

[simmsimaging]

Vray.de is a good resource, but it is pretty hit and miss.

Certification on the MXM gallery is a somewhat arbitrary thing as I understand it. It just means that Next Limit considers the materials uploaded by those users to be more reliable and better quality, but from what I understand there are no real rigid qualifications.

There are quite a few crap materials on the MXM site too, but because someone at Next Limit reviews them you can at least be sure the maps are there and that it will render. My understanding is that they don't restrict them for quality though - just that they will at least work out of the box.

What I think separates the MXM gallery more is that it is tough or impossible for illegal users of the software to post materials, so you get less hacks in the general mix.

b