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FAQ: How u make dem mats? Hands-on mini-tuts for making materials and texturing

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  • Kaine123
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    Kaine123 polycounter lvl 10
    Could you guys give some general tips on making wood?
  • Bubba91873
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    Bubba91873 polygon
    Does armor plate or cast steel metal have a colored specular and what would that be ? greyish-white or a blue-ish hue ?
    Or does the specular color of the steel remains the same as the paint that is on it? I.E reflects the paint.

    Just trying to find a better spec then just a plain greyscale maps.
  • Pedro Amorim
    do you have a photo of what you're trying to replicate?
  • Bubba91873
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    Bubba91873 polygon
    do you have a photo of what you're trying to replicate?

    The paint itself on most ww2 tanks is a matte finish with what I assume is high specular low gloss. Generally I've stuck to greyscale spec maps but always wondered if I should put some color into them. The gloss tends to be pretty dark when ive done them.

    Here is some reference to give you an idea Pedro.

    http://data3.primeportal.net/tanks/daan_uiterwaal/panther_ausf_d/images/panther_ausf_d_18_of_31.jpg

    http://svsm.org/gallery/pzkpfwV/DSC_0403

    tracks with spec coming off them
    http://svsm.org/gallery/pzkpfwV/DSC_0461

    bare metal
    http://www.armorama.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=SquawkBox&file=index&req=viewtopic&topic_id=187454

    In these cases generally would the spec reflect the paint or should I stick to the greyscale white to dark highlights maps ?

    The metal tends to be "rolled pressed steel" on the body and with some casted steel such as the tracks for example.
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    Quoting this from my thread as this is more likely to be seen here and I'd like to hear your thoughts:
    Bek wrote: »
    One thing I'm curious about is using secondary specular in toolbag 2 for a carbon fiber material. As mentioned in the beta thread, materials like carbon fiber would have two reflections, and you can use a direction map to control the anisotropic direction. How exactly do you find out the properties of materials like carbon fiber, in order to know how to create the flow/direction map? Is there some resource for this or do you just examine photographs?

    Would carbon fiber (another example pic) be as simple as having the squares for the first material having the opposite (90 degree) direction in the flow map? And having the aluminium like brushed metal effect in the specular?

    I had a quick go at this and this is the result. Hopefully you can see how the different squares have a different anisotropic direction. Any thoughts on this? These are the maps used (Albedo, flow, normal, specular)

    9FPhvwZ.png
  • joeriv
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    joeriv polycounter lvl 7
    When people refer to using the secondary spec for carbon fibre they most likely mean the actualy coated carbon fibre like you see a lot on car parts:

    http://ramspeed.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Mercedes-C63-AMG-White-BMC-Carbon-Fibre-Cold-Air-Intake-Ramspeed-Automotive-6.jpg?e93aa6

    You can clearly see the light hitting the actual carbon fibre itself, and then the secondary highlight of the coating.

    For the actual carbon fibre itself I think you might be overcomplicating it:
    http://www.swiss-tuning.net/images/3d_carbon_fibre_sheet.jpg

    I don't really think there is anything here you can't do with a normal spec/gloss map, and the actual squares are so small anyway that you won't really notice any more effort.
  • Bubba91873
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    Bubba91873 polygon
    In regards to my above posts to make it simpler to answer:

    What base values for specular and gloss should I be using to represent the "matte paint" of Armored Vehicles in Photoshop?
    Materials are typically Rolled Steel Plate, Casted Steel underneath the paint for example.
  • Amsterdam Hilton Hotel
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    Amsterdam Hilton Hotel insane polycounter
    Bubba91873 wrote: »
    The paint itself on most ww2 tanks is a matte finish with what I assume is high specular low gloss. Generally I've stuck to greyscale spec maps but always wondered if I should put some color into them. The gloss tends to be pretty dark when ive done them.

    Here is some reference to give you an idea Pedro.

    http://data3.primeportal.net/tanks/daan_uiterwaal/panther_ausf_d/images/panther_ausf_d_18_of_31.jpg

    http://svsm.org/gallery/pzkpfwV/DSC_0403

    tracks with spec coming off them
    http://svsm.org/gallery/pzkpfwV/DSC_0461

    bare metal
    http://www.armorama.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=SquawkBox&file=index&req=viewtopic&topic_id=187454

    In these cases generally would the spec reflect the paint or should I stick to the greyscale white to dark highlights maps ?

    The metal tends to be "rolled pressed steel" on the body and with some casted steel such as the tracks for example.
    Bubba91873 wrote: »
    In regards to my above posts to make it simpler to answer:

    What base values for specular and gloss should I be using to represent the "matte paint" of Armored Vehicles in Photoshop?
    Materials are typically Rolled Steel Plate, Casted Steel underneath the paint for example.

    The exact values really depend on your target engine and the exact paint you're going to make. Experiment and compare your results to photo reference. For this kind of paint the spec is neutral, not colored, so keep that in mind when you choose specular values.

    Also most of those refs you posted are flash photography, which is an unusual lighting condition that tends to exaggerate the specular/gloss values of whatever's being shot. Most military paint that I've seen is specifically dull and not very reflective for camouflage purposes.
  • Bubba91873
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    Bubba91873 polygon
    The exact values really depend on your target engine and the exact paint you're going to make. Experiment and compare your results to photo reference. For this kind of paint the spec is neutral, not colored, so keep that in mind when you choose specular values.

    Also most of those refs you posted are flash photography, which is an unusual lighting condition that tends to exaggerate the specular/gloss values of whatever's being shot. Most military paint that I've seen is specifically dull and not very reflective for camouflage purposes.

    This is actually just high poly work and not for any game engine. Target renderer is 3ds max MR/Vray. The ref pics were just quick grabs from the net of which I got a lot of links. Those pics did indeed have too much lighting and flash from cameras used.

    So if I understand correctly, If the paint is matte/neutral Id go for a darker starting spec value f.e. a 64, 64, 64 or lower in photoshop ? Would it have wider highlights or smaller highlights in the gloss map i.e "brighter values or darker".

    I had wondered if steel plate even with a matte camo paint actually did give off a colored spec, I am unsure myself.

    Thank you for the help and the pointers.
  • Racer445
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    Racer445 polycounter lvl 12
    Bubba91873 wrote: »
    So if I understand correctly, If the paint is matte/neutral Id go for a darker starting spec value f.e. a 64, 64, 64 or lower in photoshop ? Would it have wider highlights or smaller highlights in the gloss map i.e "brighter values or darker".

    I had wondered if steel plate even with a matte camo paint actually did give off a colored spec, I am unsure myself.

    with any sort of paint, that paint becomes the material you're defining, not the metal underneath until the paint scrapes off. usually unless it's some form of pearlescent or layered paint it won't have any specular color.

    find a picture of paint on a tank. it's very matte, which means it doesn't reflect much of anything. this is by design for camo reasons. this of course, means very low specular and very low glossiness. this sort of material is actually very hard to define properly in CG, you need to make sure you get lots of nice ambient color going on and good lighting.
  • Amsterdam Hilton Hotel
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    Amsterdam Hilton Hotel insane polycounter
    Bubba91873 wrote: »
    So if I understand correctly, If the paint is matte/neutral Id go for a darker starting spec value f.e. a 64, 64, 64 or lower in photoshop ? Would it have wider highlights or smaller highlights in the gloss map i.e "brighter values or darker".

    I had wondered if steel plate even with a matte camo paint actually did give off a colored spec, I am unsure myself.
    Well, it's tough to diagnose exact values. There is some science that can at least give you a clue as to what you should be doing though.

    The paint itself will have a colorless specular reflection because it's a dielectric material. Its color is a result of certain wavelengths of light being more or less absorbed as that light scatters around inside it before exiting in a diffuse manner. In terms of its specular component, which is the light that actually bounces directly off the surface and into the camera, it reflects all wavelengths equally, which is what I meant by neutral.

    The underlying metal is different, it's not a dielectric material but rather a conductor, meaning that its color doesn't come from diffuse reflection as light does not scatter around inside of it. Its color comes mainly from certain wavelengths being better reflected from its surface - the specular.

    A matte surface is one that has a fairly low gloss so 64,64,64 might well be a good starting point which you can tweak up or down to best match references. Specular is also something you'll need to match, it's tough, a lot of the times you'll see people say that raw examples of this or that material have exact R,G,B values but the reality is that when we're texturing we are never dealing with raw materials. Materials in the real world have different manufacturing processes, different weathering, etc. It's all about tweaking values to match solid references.
  • Bubba91873
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    Bubba91873 polygon
    Thank you very much for all the helpful info sir.

    Up to now on all my vehicles I've been starting out with moderately high spec and low gloss maps. Heavily emphasing scratches and scrapes in both maps as usual with bright values. Dirt as dark with heavy variance.
    Also I usually divided the values in quarters of 0-255 in photoshop if that makes sence just to get basic values down and then tweak up or down to make the maps functional and readable.

    With german camo and armor, there was a wide variance so yes indeed its hard to nail down exact values on such a wide topic.
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    Does anyone know where I could find a good list of materials and the albedo/roughness values they should have for a physically-based shader? Kind of like http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-513458.html but for physically-based shaders.
  • joeriv
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    joeriv polycounter lvl 7
    edit: Thought you meant reflectance values because you linked IOR values.
    For albedo there is 1 chart
    https://www.fxguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Albedo_values.jpg
    But that's just to give you an idea of the values (like the max/min).

    For the roughness there is no such thing, so you'll have to rely on your eyeballs/observation for this.
    ---


    there is a image in the zip of this shader
    http://www.kostas.se/?p=30

    http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/dontnod-specular-and-glossiness-chart/

    And on this page you can find how to do the conversion yourself in case you can't find the material and you insist on having the actual value, but remember that these kinds of materials are "perfect" ones, so don't rely on just using it as final values (imo).
    http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/feeding-a-physical-based-lighting-mode/
  • mrjojo
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    mrjojo polycounter lvl 7
    i have a pencil model unwrapped and partially painted in photoshop. how can use the mix of both vray default mats + my own painted texture? i want the texture just to be applied to the tip of the pencil,whereas the rest of the pencil uses the default vray diffuse color.

    sch7LQj.jpg
  • Fingus
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    Fingus polycounter lvl 11
    Is this vRay for Max or Maya?
  • mrjojo
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    mrjojo polycounter lvl 7
    Fingus wrote: »
    Is this vRay for Max or Maya?

    max
  • huffer
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    huffer interpolator
    Create a Blend material between two materials: one with your painted texture, and a simple one with red diffuse, and use as a blending mask your painted texture (make sure it's black and white, mess around with levels in Photoshop). You could also use a single material and have a Mix map, with your painted texture in one slot and a red VrayColor in the other, same alpha mask.
  • acitone
    This is a good and helpful thread. Thanks for this.

    I am making a character, with long hair using planes and I'm not able to get good results. The diffuse and normal maps don't look bad, but the specular just kind of looks white in most parts and won't shine at all in some areas of the plane no matter how bright I make them in the spec map. I'm using 3ds Max and a Standard material with Anisotropic shading. Any help or tips on how I can get the sheen on the hair and what mat to use would be nice!
  • Pedro Amorim
    Playing with some mats.
    Styrofoam one.

    foamy.jpg

    suposed to be something close to this.

    fgm148-javelin_12.jpg




    video: www.edgesize.com/crap/foam_processed.avi
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
    That's really hot pedro :o
  • Pedro Amorim
    I actually recorded the thing yesterday.

    www.edgesize.com/crap/foam_processed.avi

    Sorry about being so long and shit. I was just messing around trying to come up with some nice tips for y'all.
  • SPYFF
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    SPYFF polycounter lvl 10
    Great job Pedro!
  • Noah P
    Hello everyone I'm new here and I'm seeking to improve my art and this looks like a good thread to start asking questions!

    I'm a intermediate 3D modeler and I've been messing with this for around 3 years now. One of the things I struggle most with is UVs. Here is a kind of R/C Bike I made as a low poly model for a game project that I am now working on as a portfolio piece and I thought it would make a good demonstration of what I'm struggling with. Specifically how do you all as experienced modelers begin UVing a model like this? Do you UV the individual parts and them merge them together into one model? Should I use unwrapping or unique UVs? Or should I use some kind of UV projection like a Cubic project? I apologize if this is too broad a question but its one of the biggest obstacles for me as a 3D artist. I really appreciate any advice or help you guys cane give me here!
  • PixelsGenerated
    Heya All !

    I've got something that has been bugging me for a few days and i can't seem to get it right.

    It's about a wooden stool, which has a LED light inside of it.

    Bright-Woods-collection-for-Avanzini-Group-by-Giancarlo-Zema.jpg
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2iy_kzrYpw&list=UUrskmaWkmAxAaAPeI0OLCvA#t=106

    As far as i can tell, it is a wooden structure with some kind of wax / plastic / resin in between which has been smoothed and coated.

    My first try were to recreate a material that looked like that, that almost did the trick except i can't get the lighting inside to work.

    The model was made with a spline and a loft, the rendering engine: Vray 2.4

    The material set-up i used is:

    Blend material:

    Material 1: Advanced noise map > with a self illuminating color
    Material 2: Vrayblend material with base material: procedural wood texture and the first coat: a dark vray material

    These are masked with a tiles material: stacked bond with no vertical tiles to get the striped pattern.

    The result is as following ISfw3Ps.jpg

    The lighting is too bright and the advaned noise isn't creating the breaking of light which i hoped it would.

    I also tried some VrayLight material but i couldn't get these to work.

    So the second thing i did was to recreate the thing.
    Applied a edit poly modifier on top of the spline, shell modifier and replaced the material with a glass / milky glas material so you could see through and placed a omni inside of it.

    The result
    kjKpVQp.jpg

    But that also didn't work.

    So now is my question

    How u make dem mat ???


    Thanks in advanced
  • Nosslak
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    Nosslak polycounter lvl 12
    I'm no expert or anything but I would try adding a strong fresnel effect to control the brightness of the lights and make some actual occluding geometry for the wooden parts (you're using vray so it shouldn't matter, but if you'd do this for UDK or whatever I'd use parallax occlusion).

    Good luck!
  • .Wiki
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    .Wiki polycounter lvl 8
    I would use SSS for the base material and first try to make it look right without the wood. After that you could at the second material layer with the wood.
  • Heretic Interactive
  • Joltya
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    Joltya polycounter lvl 10
    So I need to make a grip tape texture. It's kind of a weird looking material, so I figured I'd try it out on a ball first. I'm kind of "meh" about my results though. Any idea/suggestions?

    ZaBzzYB.jpg
    YjpFDVQ.jpg
    5rhNDsN.jpg
  • Mr Significant
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    Mr Significant polycounter lvl 11
    You see little shiny dots on this iphone? Make them on spec, copy albedo, saturate it, and adjust level to very high values. You can try this. Dont know about gloss.
  • Joopson
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    Joopson quad damage
    Yeah, it just needs a brighter spec on the "up" areas. Basically, using the gloss as the spec may work. Looks great so far, just doesn't pop quite enough!
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Small tip on finding reference material for materials like this, obviously you aren't going to find a grip tape ball to look at the specular, so the next best thing is to find it on a cylinder or roll. It makes it much easier to see how the spec/gloss behaves.

    1gsup2roll900kk.jpg
  • StrangerDanger
    LltEBbt.jpg Just cant get the blade shape down. Im pretty fresh to this. I have no idea how to go about that shape.
  • timotronprime
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    timotronprime polycounter lvl 11
    Just cant get the blade shape down. Im pretty fresh to this. I have  no idea how to go about that shape.

    The couple posts above are already discussing a material highly similar to the blade shape.
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    My quick take on it over lunch. Kinda meh. Hard to get those bright spots to really pop without killing the rest of the spec.



    Edit:

    Some tweaks:

    http://i.imgur.com/z7TV01n.jpg (MAPS)

    (Used Emissive to make the speckles really pop)

    9KWj9zJ.jpg
  • Pedro Amorim
    Really cool S6! Thanks for posting ;)
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    Yeah man! I was going to say your styrofoam is awesome as well! I want to sculpt something like that. Recreate an entire object in various sized spheres, Dynamesh it, then CLIP ALL THE POLIES.

    :D

    Anyway. Dual purpose post here: One, to help people with carbon fiber (Assuming the result I got doesn't suck).

    The other purpose is to ask if there is a way to get a glossy carbon fiber without using duplicated geometry (like I did here, for the "Clear coat").

    I tried secondary reflection, but this still uses the normal information from the map, instead of the mesh. I would assume Ideally the secondary reflection would use the mesh normals to get the correct effect here. Being able to recreate this in a single material would be awesome. I'm open to solutions in unreal/cryengine as well if anyone has any.

    What is really cool about this material is that the Diffuse, Spec, Normals, and 'Base' Gloss can all be really small maps. even though I used a 2048^2 here, I could have achieved the same exact effect using a 128^2. The only map that would be large enough to convey details nicely would be the secondary gloss, for the clear coat. As that tiles much less frequently.



    h0zbr2.png
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    s6, instead of varying the spec/gloss values on alternating squares like a checkerboard, you should use anisotropic secondary specular on your base shader with a direction map to control the anisotropic direction. On the direction map, have each alternating square be either solid red or solid green. It may take a little playing around to figure out which color works best with which square so the shading looks right.

    That will give you a far more believable and realistic material because the spec value will always remain the same instead of changing depending on which direction the fibers are going.
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    Awesome advice! Really brought the right action to the material when light hits it. Much appreciated, man.

    I'm going to tweak it a bit more, but definitely in the right direction.

    *Removed to keep it lighter-Results below*
  • Swizzle
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    Swizzle polycounter lvl 15
    Glad to help!

    Looks like there's some weird shading going on at grazing angles, though. Almost like the anisotropic is making the normals for certain angles be completely smooth. Interesting.

    I'd recommend posting that in the Toolbag 2 thread so they can take a look at it; you may have stumbled across an obscure shading bug.
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    Nah, just some janky geo. I made that quick in solidworks one day so it has some overlapping face/vert issues. I need to run a dynamesh over the STL one of these days to get clean geo.

    Or stop being a lazy shit and actually model it :D
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    What I ended up on. Thanks again for the help Swiz!



    7ZrAw5.gif
  • Bek
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    Bek interpolator
    S6, didn't you see page 5?

    You'd definitely be able to do such a material with one mesh; since the limitation here is tb2. They kept things simple here for obvious reasons, so in some cases you have to use workarounds like that. As mentioned by EQ in the tb2 thread.
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    Yeah, I did catch that on page 5. I mis understood the purpose of you post though, having only skimmed the first portion of it. It appeared like you were looking for advice on it.

    And it's good to hear you can pull this off all in one material. Once I get my hands on UE4 i'll have to give it a go.
  • cookedpeanut
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    cookedpeanut polycounter lvl 12
    Ok, I'm terrible at material definition so while I'd love to make an attempt at this, if I do I'll just go straight in and texture it to how I see fit.
    HOWEVER, for the sake of authenticity, how could I make this polymer material?
    6358_6410.jpg
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    About the same as the grip tape 9 posts up. with a less aggressive spec and a possibly a higher gloss value.

    and maybe more aggressive normal.
  • Gearman
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    Gearman polycounter lvl 11
    s6 wrote: »
    What I ended up on. Thanks again for the help Swiz!



    7ZrAw5.gif

    This is fantastic. Nice work.
  • Kaine123
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    Kaine123 polycounter lvl 10
    ga7k4Jv.png
    I need some material advice, do you guys think this looks like patina metal? If not, what would you suggest I go about doing in order to fix that? Gah I feel like I can never get materials right. (I'm using Xoliul Viewport Shader btw.)
  • EarthQuake
    "patina metal" is really vague, post some reference for the exact material you're trying to recreate.
  • Kaine123
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    Kaine123 polycounter lvl 10
    j5Pw590.jpg
    nBkTAKL.jpg
    gePyPHk.jpg

    It looks as though there's a thin layer of oxidation, so I tried recreating that.
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