Glass terrazzo

[Neilg]

Is it possible to scan glass terrazzo?
I emailed using the contact form on the website but figured it might be worth posting here too
Here are 2 quick references I pulled off google -



The chunks of glass embedded in the stone give it a lot of very visible depth, and also sparkle when light catches them. Been trying to make a material like this using relief mapping and coat layers, but I still cant get it to catch the light like the real thing does.

[Ivaylo Katev]

the second one seems OK, should be scanned with no problems, about the first one i'm not sure, the pieces are made of glass? but in all the cases we are not able to produce materials bigger than 20x20 cm, i suppose for architectural purposes this is too small isn't it?

[Neilg]

They're the same kind of material - the second is photographed at an angle to show how the pieces of glass catch light and sparkle. In the second there's more color in the glass so it looks less transparent but it's internal reflections producing the highlights.

Hard to say how 20x20 would work... I can test using a crop of a diffuse texture we have of it. It's a finely detailed material so there would be enough of the features, but if I had a scan that small i'd want to make it 5x the size in photoshop to remove tiling. It's covering an area that's 50 metres long, cut into slightly varying shades (in the second example you can see it's cut into black & brown - however this will only be slight variations of gray).
I got a reply to my email about licensing too, worrying that we'll need a license for every machine that will render this material. we have 18 19k wide images to do and they need every machine in our studio contributing.

[Ivaylo Katev]

the render licenses are currently free, so don't worry about this, only the material and GUI license is paid.
for 50m long area you must have tilled sample in all the cases, there is no way to cover it with single unique piece

[Neilg]

the render licenses are currently free, so don't worry about this, only the material and GUI license is paid.
for 50m long area you must have tilled sample in all the cases, there is no way to cover it with single unique piece

Yeah - it would always have to tile, but a 20cm tiling compared to a 1m texture made in photoshop will produce a very different result. Do the scanned materials work in a vray blend? I could always try multiple at slightly different rotations with a noise blend to help hide tiling...

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes they work in blend material, no problem.
i know that bigger samples have better chance to avoid tilling. can you post a closeup photo with a size reference object on it?

[jacksc02]

Neil, have you tried the vrayflakesmtl for doing the sparkle?

[dinko.dimitrov]

the render licenses are currently free, so don't worry about this, only the material and GUI license is paid.
for 50m long area you must have tilled sample in all the cases, there is no way to cover it with single unique piece

Just to add that the render node license is not free. It costs 150 EUR per year but we can offer really great prices for bulk render node licenses.