Ceramics glazing online

Yesbird

Hi all !

If you are working with ceramics somehow - digital or real, you may be interested in these two applications for applying glazes of famous manufacturers to your models - Botz and Terracolor.

Number of glazes can be extended on demand.
Happy glazing !

Noren

Interesting, and works pretty well.
Is this simply a reflection or some form of material capture (MatCap)? I guess at some level, that's probably the same.
If the example Botz tiles are consistent enough, you might be able to get a proper MatCap of it by approximating a 3D model of the tile. Or maybe the edge regions are enough to get rid of the B. The terracolor egg would be easier.
Probably not worth the trouble, though.

Yesbird

Thanks, this is just an experiment with Three.js MatCap material, inspired by my ceramics hobby.

I had a lot of Photoshop sketches to make the sample smooth and it works, but finally lived it "as is". 

The next steps probably will be uploading a custom MatCap, using the camera for background and pushing the model to XR, as I do here: xrview.yesbird.online, but I am not sure that someone will need it - no Botz, no Terracolor are interested in this service.

Joopson

As a fellow ceramics artist, this is cool as a base concept, but a lot of what makes a glaze what it is is how it interacts with edges, gravity, etc. Obviously more uniform glazes could work just fine like this though, and look fairly accurate. More complex glazes could be adjusted/created by an artist, so potential buyers can get a better idea of how a glaze really may look, and I think that would be fantastic. But I also know a lot of glaze manufacturers probably don't see the benefit or have the money to throw at an artist.

But so many glaze websites have absolutely useless photos of their glazes-- like, a small square of clay/glaze with no context, and bad lighting. I'm really surprised glaze companies don't put even slightly more effort into showing off what makes their glazes special, and showing them in real context.

Yesbird

Few years ago, when I only started to play with glazes, I spent about two month exploring this alchemy, including physics, temperature modes, clay interaction, etc. I discussed many aspects of glaze-modelling and rendering with professionals and finally came to the conclusion that the system is too complicated to make a more or less acceptable model.

The only possible solution I see is a MatCap, maybe with some additional shader-based user-controlled effects and I guess for illustrative purposes it will be enough.

I would like to continue this investigation, as it is very interesting and is consistent with my ceramics passion, but without sponsorship from glaze manufactures I have not enough motivation. Maybe contacting other manufacturers will give some results, but I do not believe in success.

Another possible option I see is a ceramists community supported project, I will try to promote it on appropriate forums - it's interesting how the community will react, taking into account that many ceramists are using printers now (as me) and hence have 3D models.

In any case there is a lot of space for improvement of quality and usability, for example here is my experiment of glaze running done with a Redshift:

Yesbird

To simplify the process of creating a clean and smooth MatCap textures from arbitrary glazes examples, I am exploring different AI-based approaches, in particular Neural style transfer, StyleGAN and Stable Diffusion look the most promising to me.

Here are the first results of my attempts to explain to Stable Diffusion that I want to create a sphere and teapot based on the original Botz sample - they are funny, but totally useless for this application.

It looks like LLM control is too inaccurate for this purpose and will try Neural style transfer or maybe StyleGAN instead.
Has anyone experience working with something similar ?

Yesbird

I only want to tell you that now VR mode is  supported.
Having VR headset, you can see you model in stereo by pressing this box button at upper-right corner: 

https://glazeview.yesbird.online/botz.html
https://glazeview.yesbird.online/tc.html