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about 5 years ago when i was a total nube, as opposed to still nube.
i was just finishing 1 year of mental ray, and i was getting into rendering plant leaves.
at the time i had no idea how to use a transparency channel, because i generally used either jpeg
or bmp neither of which uses one, eventually i photoshopped a alpha matte of my google leaf pic to
make a black and white pic and piped it into transparency, because i didn't understand the concept
of a RGBA 4 layer format like PNG or TIFF. ( which eventually i learned )
next there was the issue of a normal map because the leaf pic i got from google had one but i didn't
know how to use Ndo (legacy) to make one, or what the significance of tangent, world, and bump was in
the settings.
i was using a single poligon with a single face, (so it didn't really matter, but again eventually learned
that too.) because the reflection and specularity doesn't really play a part until you add height data.
so, river crossed now we have a single poligon, with diffuse/normal. and i was making the transition
from mental ray to Vray because of unlimited render nodes, not because it is open source. and i said:
"how come the mental ray leaf looks good and the Vray leaf looks bland" answer 2 specular channels.
because mental ray uses: specularity and reflection on differant channels and vray uses specularity
as a extention of reflection.
(57.34+min youtube v=OY_Lef_K84l)
therefore the specularity showed up as a sharp white flash, where the reflection shows up as a soft fade to
the frenel. and in vray it just shows up as either one or the other not both. after spending 1 year
studying vray, such as 12hrs gnomon forest, ndo function, RGBA, normal tangent vs world, and getting
ok results with sun/sky, hdri, domelight... i learned 'Vray doesn't have 2 specular channels'
now when you see some the of the stunning shots from star citizen, they have 2 or even 3 specular
channels on some of their shaders, and the effect is breath taking you say i wanna play that game.
but vray still just one.
so i was studying toon shaders and they are talking about facing angles and layered ramps with spline
and linear connections and i said couldn't you just use a ramp to define specularity? with a 3 color
toon shader and use the specular highlight as the facing angle to the light, and the second color as
your reflection with a spline fade to frenel, and our third color as a transparency to show all the hard
work we did on our diffuse shader. or redundantly couldn't we pipe the export files from Substance Painter
into the toon colors 1,2. and then layer them with our vray diffuse texture on a seperate shader?
just a thought, since i have been studying vray for 5 years now and everyone is hot on PBR and substance mari
and so on, but vray is mum on the topic...
i was just finishing 1 year of mental ray, and i was getting into rendering plant leaves.
at the time i had no idea how to use a transparency channel, because i generally used either jpeg
or bmp neither of which uses one, eventually i photoshopped a alpha matte of my google leaf pic to
make a black and white pic and piped it into transparency, because i didn't understand the concept
of a RGBA 4 layer format like PNG or TIFF. ( which eventually i learned )
next there was the issue of a normal map because the leaf pic i got from google had one but i didn't
know how to use Ndo (legacy) to make one, or what the significance of tangent, world, and bump was in
the settings.
i was using a single poligon with a single face, (so it didn't really matter, but again eventually learned
that too.) because the reflection and specularity doesn't really play a part until you add height data.
so, river crossed now we have a single poligon, with diffuse/normal. and i was making the transition
from mental ray to Vray because of unlimited render nodes, not because it is open source. and i said:
"how come the mental ray leaf looks good and the Vray leaf looks bland" answer 2 specular channels.
because mental ray uses: specularity and reflection on differant channels and vray uses specularity
as a extention of reflection.
(57.34+min youtube v=OY_Lef_K84l)
therefore the specularity showed up as a sharp white flash, where the reflection shows up as a soft fade to
the frenel. and in vray it just shows up as either one or the other not both. after spending 1 year
studying vray, such as 12hrs gnomon forest, ndo function, RGBA, normal tangent vs world, and getting
ok results with sun/sky, hdri, domelight... i learned 'Vray doesn't have 2 specular channels'
now when you see some the of the stunning shots from star citizen, they have 2 or even 3 specular
channels on some of their shaders, and the effect is breath taking you say i wanna play that game.
but vray still just one.
so i was studying toon shaders and they are talking about facing angles and layered ramps with spline
and linear connections and i said couldn't you just use a ramp to define specularity? with a 3 color
toon shader and use the specular highlight as the facing angle to the light, and the second color as
your reflection with a spline fade to frenel, and our third color as a transparency to show all the hard
work we did on our diffuse shader. or redundantly couldn't we pipe the export files from Substance Painter
into the toon colors 1,2. and then layer them with our vray diffuse texture on a seperate shader?
just a thought, since i have been studying vray for 5 years now and everyone is hot on PBR and substance mari
and so on, but vray is mum on the topic...
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