Need advice procedural materials with no uv directly in Arnold or substance with uv
polycounter lvl 6
Hello, I need some advice regarding material creation for a pre rendered scene that I'm making in Maya that will be rendered with Arnold. My goal is to create a beauty render.
I was thinking about the workflow to use to create materials for the scene, I usually do a proper uv workflow where I make the materials inside substance but I also read that some people make procedural materials directly inside Arnold without the need to uv map the meshes.
This would be a time saver because the scene will have a lot of props with a lot of details.
So what I'm asking is some advice regarding these 2 workflows, is it better to properly uv the meshes and make the materials in substance or using only procedural materials with no uvs is also good?
And what are the downside of the latter ( aside from text placement ) ?
I was thinking about the workflow to use to create materials for the scene, I usually do a proper uv workflow where I make the materials inside substance but I also read that some people make procedural materials directly inside Arnold without the need to uv map the meshes.
This would be a time saver because the scene will have a lot of props with a lot of details.
So what I'm asking is some advice regarding these 2 workflows, is it better to properly uv the meshes and make the materials in substance or using only procedural materials with no uvs is also good?
And what are the downside of the latter ( aside from text placement ) ?
Replies
I think that at the the end i will texture the props inside Painter because i already have a lot of materials and smart materials in my library so it will probably be faster this way instead of creating procedural materials inside Arnold from scratch every time and it also gives me more customization options.
For other meshes where i need displacement or particular reflections i will make the materials directly inside Arnold probably.
We do this a lot where I work, except with 3ds Max and V-Ray, but the same basic concept. Mostly we can get away with procedural mix masks, requiring few hand-painted details.
If we need localized detail, like specific wear patterns, we use vertex painted masks, or we use quickie masks painted into an automatic UV atlas, painted with Viewport Canvas (3ds Max's built-in 3d paint tool).
We do use tiling textures a lot more than procedurals though, so decent UVs are still very important for us. As onionhead_o noted, procedurals do take a lot of tweaking to get realistic results, and that takes time. Time probably better spent making decent UVs!
Anyhow hope that helps.
Regarding UV vs procedurals i think that, time wise, i will probably make UVs for the meshes to apply textures and substance materials on them.
Maybe i can use procedural materials with no UVs for background object or the most simplest one that doesn't require hours of tweaking so some sort of mixed workflow.