Vray Blend Material?

[Soth3dlife]

Greetings! I've been looking for the blend material and I didn't find it, is it missing or there's a different way to get it?

thanks in advance

[vladimir.nedev]

The blend material is currently implemented to work the way it works in the modo renderer. You can find an explanation in this
forum thread from the modo forums : http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/di...84626&p=762735

Basically you need to have one "Shader" item for each "Material" item you want to blend. The "Shader" item opacity and layer mask
are the weight texture from the V-Ray Blend material.

This approach of using the shader tree makes it easier to add a coat layer to many items in the scene, each with possibly different sub-materials.
It can be confusing though so we will probably add a separate method, where you set-up the blend material in the Schematic.

I am attaching a simple scene as an example. The sphere on the left has 4 different material layers, each with different reflection glossiness (or roughness as it is called in modo).

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[Soth3dlife]

Thanks Vladimir! very helpful! I see! Blending like this slows modo down quite a bit. I just made a test with 3 layers:

-red coat
-clear coat
-brushed metal (revealed by a mask)

Is it normal that it slows down so much in modo? in maya doesn't seem to affect that much

[Soth3dlife]

by the way, I've been running some tests. I guess unless you need to make specific change we don't need to create a shader item for each layer right? it doesn't seem to contribute at all, at least not in my test

[vladimir.nedev]

Thanks Vladimir! very helpful! I see! Blending like this slows modo down quite a bit. I just made a test with 3 layers:

-red coat
-clear coat
-brushed metal (revealed by a mask)

Is it normal that it slows down so much in modo? in maya doesn't seem to affect that much

V-Ray for MODO shouldn't be any slower than V-Ray for Maya in this case. The "Shader" items should be set
to "Normal" blending mode, if you set them to "Add", it will be the same as checking "Additive mode" in the V-Ray
blend material and this might slow down the render.

You can attach the scene so I can check if there is something wrong.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[vladimir.nedev]

by the way, I've been running some tests. I guess unless you need to make specific change we don't need to create a shader item for each layer right? it doesn't seem to contribute at all, at least not in my test

The "Shader" items on top should have opacity < 1.0, otherwise the bottom layers won't be seen at all.

You can of course blend materials directly. I've seen it in a lot of MODO sample scenes. Basically having
2 materials (V-Ray or not) with a layer mask on the top material. This will blend all the texture channels
of the materials (they need to be of the same type) and make one final material from that. It is not the
same as blending with Shaders though, as the lighting and reflections are computed only once. So you
can't make a glossy material with some clear reflections on it. For this you need more than one Shader,

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[Soth3dlife]

This is a clear coat on top of a painted coat. It works definetly. Although with this type of Look Development the Shader Tree can become a mess easily. It is pretty cool how easy is to setup. By The way, in terms of the Vray Bump Material what can we do?

[vladimir.nedev]

This is a clear coat on top of a painted coat. It works definetly. Although with this type of Look Development the Shader Tree can become a mess easily. It is pretty cool how easy is to setup. By The way, in terms of the Vray Bump Material what can we do?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]20856[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]20857[/ATTACH]

The V-Ray Bump material is created when there is a texture layer set to the "Bump" or "Normal" texture effects.
The "Texture layers" tab for each V-Ray material has the bump amplitude and the other bump mapping properties.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[Soth3dlife]

I meant more like the Vray Bump material. In Maya I used to use it after a blend material to plug a bump based on the mask of the blend material

[vladimir.nedev]

I meant more like the Vray Bump material. In Maya I used to use it after a blend material to plug a bump based on the mask of the blend material

So the idea is to have the bump map change from one blended material to another, based on the blend amount texture of the blend material ?
I think the result will be the same if you let each material layer have its own bump map. In Maya it will be
material -> bump material \
--------------------------blend material
material -> bump material /

In MODO you just have one "bump" texture for each "Shader". There is also the "Clear previous bump" option in the "Texture layers" tab, which you can disable, if the bump maps are the same.

Might be a bit slower this way as the bump is computed twice. For MODO we will eventually implement the blend, 2sided and bump materials with nodal shading as well, but I am not sure
when this will happen.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[Soth3dlife]

That's what I meant, it's good to know that. Thanks for answering