A question to somebody who knows about material stuff

Cuvey

So, the thing is, how do you think this kind of materials, specifically for 3d animated films/shorts are produced?

I just finished watching Grant Warwick’s Mastering Vray (amazing lessons by the way) and that makes me think of the workflow where you do a different material say for the base and other for the scratches and mix them with a mask. So far so good but that can really increase render times. So there’s the other option, the more “real-time” option, where you have just one material and many maps to define how it looks (diffuse, specular, glossiness, etc).

Could you make the same result? And if so, with faster render times? When you use that workflow I’m not sure how you would incorporate stuff like multiple materials for more control on the specular, it seems it would be less realistic. But what if you’re doing something more stylized, like most of the examples? And what if you’re in a budget or with an older pc?

 I specifically would like to know how you would overlay two completely different materials, for example wet mud on cloth

I’d appreciate anything you may tell me because the lack of information about the topic is driving me insane.

musashidan

This is what the Disney brdf ggx model does. It was developed on the film Wreck-it Ralph to simplify the amount and type of maps needed to create realistic materials. It has since been adopted by modern game pipelines and is pretty much the new standard in realtime texturing/shading.

The metalness map defines whether the material is metal or non-metal (dielectric)the roughness map defines how glossy the reflections are. So you can simulate the masked shader blending method used in offline rendering like your Vray example.

I used it on a recent project (exporting all maps from Substance Painter to Vray) and tried it instead of the usual layered masked blended shading I usually do for offline rendering projects. It worked out great. Substance Painter converts the metal/rough maps to maps suitable for Vray's GGX shading and map types.


In this workflow the roughness map is king.

Cuvey

I don't know why I didn't think about it before, but now I realise it was obvious that they would have their custom GXX model.

The metalness map you describe is the same metalness map used in Marmoset Toolbag? At least I've got some experience with that one. I should try Substance, one of the things keeping me away from it is that I wasn't sure if you could export maps that would be useful in Vray. And the other thing, but it's not that much related to this, is if you can use it to paint characters as well, like skin and organic stuff, because every example I've seen uses it for inorganic models

Thanks a lot for the reply, it was really useful

SnoozeButton

Hey Cuvey,
Look up Quixel (DDO, 3DO), it kind of works in the way you describe and has an awesome real-time workflow.