FAQ: How u make dem mats? Hands-on mini-tuts for making materials and texturing
mod
So, decided to make similar thread to the how you model dem shapes, but for materials and texturing. For example if you are trying to make a material that has copper and brass, you just post your reference pics and what you go so far with the flats and we can try give tips on how to achieve the look you want.
You guys can share tips on material detailing like cool tips for making dirt of dust.
For example, mother of pearl
I have no idea how to make this mat.
Any tips?
You guys can share tips on material detailing like cool tips for making dirt of dust.
For example, mother of pearl
I have no idea how to make this mat.
Any tips?
Replies
As for your question, I won't pretend to know; but just using my basic knowledge of materials, I would think that using a flowmap (anisotropy map) could be the way to deal with the odd way the light interacts with it. A bit like what you'd do with a hair material, or brushed metal, or something.
I forgot to say tho........ can't have colored spec.
Not sure it the material will sell withouth colored spec tho'!
Damn... had high hopes for seeing some cool stuff in this thread. Without colored spec it's going to be pretty hard to re-create the look of the sample.
you might be able to get an all white MOP effect with anistropic lighting and a well made aniso-direction map. That seems even more exotic than colored spec though.
Im pretty noob when it comes to texturing could you possibly elaborate on why the grey spec is funny? also if you see this i really enjoyed your marmoset materiel tutorial
The main defining characteristic for this type of material is the color variation in the specular reflections. Ideally you would even want to use a two-layered specular component, like you would for a car shader, to pull off the effect.
Simple greyscale makes the look very hard to pull off, you've gotta "bake" the color into the diffuse then, basically.
Glad you enjoyed the tutorial!
Anywho, guys! Feel free to ask questions about materials and whatnot, or post tips and little workflows for your texturing
Used anistropic lighting with a kinda noisy random direction map
Spec is just a tiling rainbow cloud texture. multiplied by itself in UDK to punch it up.
Used a chunk of respawnrt's diffuse for the base diffuse.
Cubemap reflection for surface shininess. just grabbed one of the default UDK ones. a customized one might look a bit better.
It's pretty quick and dirty, but with more care in making the diff/spec/direction maps agree it might work.
Pedro: is there any reason you can't do coloured spec? Is it a memory thing, or you don't have/can't use a shader supporting it?
edit: your username rocks ahah
Now, on the MOP subject, can't you hack the effect with some simple shader math? For our current game, while we could technically use colored spec, in order to save on texture memory and lookups we ended up multiplying the specular with the albedo to make it colored without an additional texture. Sure it's pretty limiting and it works in our case because the art direction allows it but it could just as well work for a specific mother of pearl shader. In respawnrt's example there doesn't seem to be much hue variation between the diffuse and the specular textures, the spec seems like a more saturated version of the diffuse anyway. If you multiply them and bump the intensity up a bit you could get pretty close. Not perfect, but close considering the limitations you're working with.
I'm guessing the term Physical is used since it tries to mimic reality to a greater extent than more traditional used to. There's a substance texture as well which pretty much defines a Index Of Refraction value which defines the material. What this affects is such parameters as at what viewing angle will the material spec/reflect and to what extent, also the tint of specularity and reflections. It's pretty much just metals that have some color variation in the substance.
on the reference I'm seein mainly 2 specular colors, a normal white, and sparkly blue, maybe use emissive for the blue.
I'm curious, are color Specs generally looked down upon in Physical materials? This is not the first time I hear this problem being a limitation.
I also never understood this limitation, I mean I understand if you don't want to use a Colored Gloss Map to dictate the clamping of hues through it and decrease the chances of artist mistake, but Spec map itself?
Anyone have thoughts?
as most of the specular color is a reflection of the cubemaps a colored specular map is not really needed in "most" cases.
Also "faking it" completely destroys the purpose of having a physically based shader system..
However there are limitations iridescent materials and nice goldish metals being one of them.
Pedro, probably shader magic will be the only way, like Goat posted.
The thing is, there doesn't seem to be a set definition for what "iridescence", "pearlescence" and the like means. Many cars have that sparkle and sheen that many call pearlescent, but others call pearlescence when the base color has a specular color of a different hue, and iridescence when the specular color changes with the angle...
Anyways, my question is, how would one simulate opal? One can fake it of course with various maps, or simply by using Max's car paint shader/mat (which can make a pretty decent "fake" opal for the amount of time it takes, see the attachment). But how would one simulate it to where the speckles change color on the angle and flash in and out of visibility?
And how would one just do normal iridescence in max, where the specular color changes hue?
I've often wondered if you could use max's SSS for this. When it's not set up right, the photons are shown as multicolored circles of light on the object. Could that be useful?
http://viscorbel.com/creating-mother-of-pearl-material-with-vray/
But he uses like a mix of 3 materials blended together, which all use anisotropic spec and each has a diferent rotation angle and colored spec, so, its a bit hard to do something like this.
So there's no way to simply tell max or whatever program to have the hue of the specular color to change based on the camera angle? I would think it would be a simple thing to program into a material or shader.
In addition to the obvious material section on max plugins, there's the mental ray mat section which is kinda hidden. http://www.maxplugins.de/mentalray.php?range=Material&sort=Author
I'll admit I don't understand all of it, and can't merely copy their method because they aren't using max as far as I can tell, but it should be helpful.
hard to see it in a still but the sparklies do look colored unless the specular focus is right on them. spec map is monochrome, but it needs to have reflection/environment map to disguise the color spec thats baked into the diffuse.
In marmoset, I had it set to Anisotropic, and spec intensity and gloss were all the way up.
no diffuse map?
It'll work for sure within UDK. Not sure about other engines. But in theory, if you can use spec, gloss, and anisotropy, it should work.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=105399
Alternatively, I know there are ways to fake it in Photoshop. Here are some links from the Wiki:
http://wiki.polycount.com/FlowMap?highlight=%28\bCategoryTexturing\b%29
Does anybody here know anything about using flowmaps? I've never used one before.
I lol'd so freaking Hard @ DEElekgolo Nice reference.
Looking at some SSS materials and how to cheat them without shader manipulation, I'll post some references when I find a good one...
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=69829