Archive for the 'Material Settings' Category
In this tutorial I will show you 2 ways of making a frosted glass material in 3d max. The first part of the tutorial is focused on obtaining this type of material directly from the render. Although this part is especially written for 3ds max and vray, the same workflow can be applied to any other rendering software.
First method
1) The basic material settings.
Every time I have a glass material in a scene, I start with the following parameters:
a) diffuse color – pure black
b) reflection – a falloff map from black to white, set to FRESNEL
c) refraction – pure white
d) Index of refraction (“IOR”) 1.4
e) Refraction “max depth” 7
If you hit a render at this stage you will have a clear glass material, like the one in the following rendering:
2) Controlling the sharpness of the refraction and reflection
As you can see both reflections and refractions are clear. You can now start by blurring the refractions. You control the sharpness by adjusting the glossiness parameter under “Refract”. A value of “1” for the glossiness produces crystal sharp refractions; by decreasing this value the refractions will become more and more blurry.
For this example, I think that a value of “0.95” is enough.
The refractions are now ok, but the reflections are still sharp.
You can adjust this in the same manner as you did for the refractions, by decreasing the glossiness parameter under “Reflect”.
The beauty of using this method is that you can control the reflection glossiness and the refraction glossiness separately; some types of frosted glass materials, although they have very blurry refractions, the reflections are quite sharp.
Here is a test I did with blurry reflections.
3) Controlling the color
If the frosted glass material that you need to obtain has a color tint, you can assign it by changing the “fog color” from white to whatever color you need.
Note: This has quite a high impact, so you need to use very bright and desaturated hues.
Bellow you will see 2 tests I did, with different values for the fog color:
4) Bump mapping
If the material you want to achieve has some bump pattern applied, just apply the desired bump map in the “bump” channel, and you’re done
Second Method
In the second part of the tutorial, we will go through a more versatile method of obtaining a frosted glass material that allows you to quickly change how the material looks, without having to render again.
Stay tuned!
UVW mapping a 3d model can be either very easy or very difficult, depending on the complexity of the 3d model and the final purpose of the computer generated image. If you have basic knowledge of texturing you know that if you have a “box like” model you apply a uvw map modifier with a box gizmo, for a bowling ball a spherical gizmo and so on…
But what happens if a client sends you a sample of a wood texture and ask you to apply that on a furniture element? One way to do it is to use tilling, but in order to do it correctly (keep the real dimensions) you need to do quite a few calculations to see how many times that texture should be tiled horizontally and vertically.
Fortunately there is another way to do it by using “real world scale” and that is the process I will try to explain in the following tutorial.
Download the 3d model
Download the wood textures that you will apply on the model
Before you begin, make sure that you have set your units to centimeters (or the units that you usually work with, except “generic units”) As you will see, for this type of approach to uvw mapping, the units are very important.
The model that we will be working with, will be mapped with 2 different materials, so the first step is to select the polygons that will have one of the textures assigned to it and set an id like in the pictures bellow.
With the selection still active, click on “edit”, “select invert” and you will end up with the other polygons selected; under “set material id”, type “2” in order to assign a new id to the second material.
At this moment you have the material ids set, so whenever you need to select the polygons that correspond to a specific material just click on “select id” and type the number that corresponds to the desired material.
http://www.cgdigest.com/material-settings/uvwmap/uvw.rar
Open the material editor, and assign a material for each of the polygon selection sets of your model.
Select the material slot of the first material that you want to work with and apply a checker map in the diffuse slot.
Under “coordinates” rollout make sure you check “Use Real World Scale” and type in the desired dimensions of your texture (in this case 5cm x 5cm).
Now apply a uvw map modifier to the object, select “box” and check “real world map size”. As you can see, every square of the pattern has 2.5 x 2.5 centimeters (the checker map is 2×2 squares with 5×5cm dimensions)
At this point, you can replace the checker map (that was just a placeholder to understand better how real world scale uvw works) with a desired wood texture, in this case a red oak. The important thing is to know exactly the size of the photo sample. This one is 35×52 cm, so you just need to type this dimensions in under the “size” parameter of the texture.
Click the image to view a higher resolution picture
Since we have completed uvw mapping the first material on our model, we can start working on the other one. In the diffuse channel select the desired texture, check “use real world scale” and type the dimensions like you did for the previous one.
As you can see from the photo above, the grain of the texture of the second material is vertical and you probably want it to be horizontal. The first thing that may cross your mind would probably be to change the axis of the uvw gizmo from “z” to “x”. This is only partially correct because even if it places the new texture correctly, it messes up the old one.
What you need to do is to collapse the uvw mapping modifier, select the polygons that correspond to the material you need to tweak and with the selection active, add a new uvw mapping modifier. By keeping the selection active, the new uvw mapping material will affect only the selected polygons.
Click again on real world map size and change the axis from “z” to “x”.
Click the image to view a higher res rendering
That’s about it; if you need to add more materials, just repeat the last steps; collapse the stack, selected again the polygons that you want to correspond to a new material, and add a uvw mapping modifier with the new selection set active.
If you have any questions feel free to ask.
After having posted the tutorial on how to create a night rendering I’ve been asked a several times through both comments and emails, how I did the grass in that rendering. Therefore, I’ve decided to do a little tutorial about creating grass as well.
1) Create a plane, or a surface that will lately become the grass.
2) Apply whatever tilebale texture on the diffuse chanel.
3) Apply a planar UVW modifier to the plane or surface you have just created.
4) Apply a vray displacement modifier above the uvw in the modifier stack.
-under “paramenters” check “2d mapping”
-under “common params” select a displacement map for your grass.
This is actually the most important factor; if your displacement map is not good, you will never get the grass to look right, regardless of the texture that you have used for the diffuse slot.
I have actually obtain good results only by using a procedural “smoke” map with various shades of green, without actually using a texture. If you don’t have a good displacement map, you can use mine.
Download grass displacement texture.
-next to “amount”, type in how much you want the grass to be displaced. For this scene (since I’ve chose meters as units),I have typed 0.18
-under “2d mapping”, “resolution” type 1024 (if you leave it at 512 it will look more like boulders than grass).
5)If necessary you can adjust the tiling of the vray displacement map. You can do that by dragging the texture to an emty slot in the material editor and select “instance” when the question will pop.
That’s it! As simple as that.
I always look forward to hearing your suggestions reagarding what tutorials should I write, so if you have any ideas feel free to contact me either by commenting here, or by email (cgdigest(at)gmail.com).
In this particular example, I have chosen to show how to create a lamp shade material using the “vray 2 sided material”, but you can create other type of similar materials like translucent paper, thin cloth, etc., following the same method.
