PaulS

Paint and Lacquer Scene

Pauls — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Alternate Materials

These are some alternate Paint and Lacquer materials imbedded in this orignial 'swoosh' scene. It contains a variation on the environment and the exact settings I used to produce the image - I thought maybe some could use that as a starting off place for their own experimentations and renderings.

Here is the file:

http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/content/upload/files/CPFinal.zip

A few notes

The sparkle metal flake effect is created with noise effecting the specular level - I found anything between .02 and .07 to work and some trial and error is required. And you have to do some of the trial and error with full AA active as the sampling can dramatically remove the effect. Nothing like setting up the perfect noise density at a medium AA setting (for render test speed) and finding the AA removed all hints of any 'flakiness' at high production output AA.

Contrast

I got the brilliant idea of heavily contrasting the noise to really push the grain :-) Most of the materials don't use this feature but some of the previous materials do. Upping it can really make the flakes pop and sing - or else completely over-saturate everything! Lots of room to definitely over-do your scene completely!:-)

Paints and Lacquers

Pauls — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:44:00 GMT

Shiny materials

This is more of a place to show and download a variety of paint/lacquer materials than a tutorial on how to create them. Each of these materials will work in general lighting conditions which contain a light for specular effects but every scene is different and in some scenes your results will be a mixed bag. Just load in one of these presets into the Material Library Scene to see how well they 'don't' work there.

These presets work, for the most part, with GI and are most effective in a contrasty, dark scene - bright needs dark to compliment it well.

The scene with alternate lighting and presets created can be downloaded here:

http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/content/upload/files/Material_Scene_FinalCP.zip

These images are an example of how the presets look under different lighting conditions:

Black Cherry

Colored_NoGi

CarPaint Blue

CarPaint Red

Green

Grey

Midnight Blue

These and additional Paint and Lacquer materials can be found in the Material Gallery as individual downloads.

Have some fun, experiment and feel free to send me examples of how you have used the materials......but above all, make it nice and shiny!:-)

Quick results in Brazil

Pauls — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:46:00 GMT

Quick Results

This is geared toward someone just getting a feel for Brazil and won't attempt to cover much more than a basic procedure - it is where I always start when-ever I'm creating an image in Brazil though.

There are lots of controls in Brazil - many places to get lost and also many places to foul up in if you aren't quite sure of what you are doing. Most rendering engines are like this so Brazil isn't particularily more difficult than anything else - yes, some are simpler but it really doesn't take too long to get the feel of where everything is.

It is possible to get great results in Brazil with just a few simple clicks - no stress....just lots of creative fun!:-)

Where do you click first?

There are so many places!

When-ever I have instructed students, results have always been of primary importance - not necessarily 'correct' procedure. Procedure is important but it's only there to get results.

What is important and what isn't important to get results? - and by results I mean a good looking image from Brazil. Not even a photo-realistic image but a visually pleasing image.

The skylight is your friend. The skylight is your best, best friend!!:-)

Forget about spotlights, pointlights, etc, etc for now. There is a light automatically on as soon as you open Rhino but if you engage the skylight, that light turns itself off - one less thing to get in our way. Click the skylight on!

From the Menu bar Brazil>Render Settings - clicked on.

Then activate the Skylight in the Simple Luma Server.

Now anything you put into you scene is going to look good. It will be correctly exposed (when the skylight was created it was set-up to give a full-range exposure - not blown-out or under-exposed - just right).

Create a ground plane (floor - without a floor the skylight is not quit fool-proof) and put a few simple objects in your scene. It's white, it's grainy but it has nice shadow quality, everything looks 3D and solid-like and has a pleasing exposure.

Here's the result.

Something which isn't absolutely needed, but I do it all the time, is to compose the view as I want and then name the view so I can recall that anytime I wish.

The Environment

If we are going to have some reflective objects then an environment is essential for good results. Open up the Environment Editor and you will see a Basic Environment in the first slot. Let's not use the basic one but load in a GI Environment - I use this one all the time. Click on the file icon (in the red box) and select GI Environment - click OK and that's done.

Click on the File Icon (in red) and select HDR Texture (also in red) - I am assuming you have downloaded the content files for the Material Scene - if you haven't do so now. Select any of the HDR Textures from the contents folder I'm using PSneighbor_Final.

One last thing and we'll leave the environment editor - probably even too much time spent here but if there are any reflective objects, it is vital you have a good/great HDRI in your Environment. Make sure the Original projection is Light Probe and ther Output is set to Equirectangular. You may need to turn down the multiplier if your reflections are too hot/bright.

Assign some Materials

Easiest way- download a bunch you think might work. That's a great way to find a look you are after and then tweak it to your satisfaction. Don't get frustrated if it doesn't quite resemble the material look in the gallery - that's only one lighting condition so expect to have the material be slightly different...or even dramatically different.

Also, just using the default materials works very well to - they feel optimized to get acceptable results with minimal tweaks.

Done

Here's the finished result - not an absolute master-piece but it is definitely an acceptable rendering and with more understanding on the Brazil toolset, can be brought to a higher level of refinement.

It is possible to get quick, fast and good looking results from Brazil with minimal fuss. I do it all the time - my clients need to see something right away and the quality I can get out of Brazil makes them very happy - which makes me happy too:-)

Have some creative fun!!

Scene file here:

Quick_Results.zip

Environment Mapping - some tips #1

Pauls — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:27:00 GMT

Unless the scene you are creating is full of great objects and a broad dynamic range of lighting to reflect, there is a good chance it will look and feel like it is missing something. Mine tend to border on being called Homely looking!:-)

Here's Homely!

Here are a few materials - a fairly basic glossy chrome blend with a little noise and some 'default' glass - assigned to some objects with the idea the scene should look good ......at least presentable. But, I'm afraid, it just looks terrible - I'm embarrassed to show it to you:-)

Bland, boring, homely!

In the Environment Editor I have a Basic 'Default' Environment and it comes in looking like this with Background color set to grey.

So my Chrome/Metal objects are looking for something to reflect and find this neutral grey in the Environment - in general, that is what is reflected. No sparkle, no cool looking materials...just flat and boring - time to go home:-).

Solution

For this scene, an easy solution to fix the bland appearance was to create a new Environment - a Composite Environment was choosen. I like to use a Composite Environment as it allows me to stack and blend multiple Environments together to fine tune the exact look I want. Probably an over-kill for this tutorial but never-the-less it's here.

I very seldom strive for perfect realism as an illustrator and in this case am only looking to create 'nice' and 'believeable' reflections. I have no problem blending an indoor and outdoor scene together to get some nice reflectivity going unless it will be too obvious the match doesn't work and becomes distacting to the eye. HDRI's are my choice of map for their broad range and I most always first attach them to a GI Environment - I like the blur options available there.

As you can see there are two seperate Environments blended together with many interesting things to reflect within the images and make this scene more attractive.

Much Better Looking

All of a sudden there is some life to the objects as they have something interesting to reflect. And a nice broad range of illumination to bounce around in between objects.

Rotate that HDRI!

At times it's just so close but not quite there yet - time to move that environment around a little. I find offsetting/rotating the image by .1 in the 'U' Offset Field and doing a test render, then increasing it more, etc, I can dial in just the right reflections for my scene...it can make a dramatic difference! Not always but sometime. It does take some trial and error but well worth the trouble. I usually use a very low sampling amount (Render P1) to do my quick environment render tests.

By offsetting the top-most Map in the Composite Environment by .675 I got the scene looking how I had envisioned it would.

Here is the scene - double check that the Composite Environment is the 'active' Environment - bit of a render hit and a few good materials wirthin the scene.

Ref Map.zip

Wrapping up

I can't stress enough how important a good environment is to get acceptable rendering results - especially with metals and glass. With one, everything seems to just work well - without one or a poor one much, much effort is spent on trying to make the scene/product look good. Spend some time offsetting your enviromental HDRIs - I think there are some nice surprises waiting to be found there.

Blending in Toon Materials

Pauls — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:47:00 GMT

Gradients

My history as an artist/illustrator contains heavy useage of the airbrush for creating different visual effects. The airbrush mostly does one thing ...and it does it extremenly well - it creates gradients. This quick tutorial will cover using the Gradient Texture to transition from one material to another. And, it will give me a chance to mention a few settings I personally like when using the toon material.

Noise is also used to transition from one material to another but it creates a look, in this case, completely different than the smooth transition a gradient will.

Here is the scene - one part smoothly transitions from toon to a BAM (Brazil Advanced Material) and for contrast the other elements transition abruptly.

Blends.zip

Toon Material

I personally like the illustration quality of the toon material and in Brazil it works very well with the other materials in the scene. Very robust.

This approach to toon is to keep the coloration flat but emphasize it's qualities by varying the outline and then blend into a more realistic material.

Ink Parameters - Ink width

In the Ink width I have placed a Shadow Light Material - this texture reacts to light intensity. Very powerful!

Lit areas are one color and shadow areas another...and a smooth transition between the two. In this case the lit areas will make the line width thin by having the min: setting at a low amount and the shadow areas, thick. These can played with to get the exact look you are after. The Shadow Light Material is such a useful texture - it can add a render hit in some places though.

A gradient texture to transition the line color from red to black has also been added....transitions rule!:-)

The Custom Curve window is used to bring the transition closer together - the handles on the end-points have been dragged out to accomplish this. Two other pieces of geometry have this material assigned in order to show the effect of the line coloration and line thickness modifications.

Blending

An Advanced Blend Material is used to blend between this toon material and a BAM using another Gradient Texture. Once assigned to the object everything is automatically mapped to the 'surfaces' and then uses this projection. Not what we are after - an interesting effect as the gradients are mapped per surface but, not the look which works well here.

In the Texture Mapping Properties a Planar projection is assigned and visability is turned on. In general, the planar projection is the only one which works with a Gradient Texture. The projection will need to be rotated and scaled 'to-taste'.

Once the proper projection is used, scaled and rotated the result is what was envisioned. A gradation from one material(Toon) to another(BAM) going from top to bottom of the object. The Custom Curve will most likely be needed to modify the transition point and amount.

Useful

The Gradient Texture is one of those textures which can be used anywhere to bring visual interest to a material and object. To emphasise two extremes, to transition between two similar materials......and everywhere in between!

Marble, Stone and other Noisy Materials

Pauls — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:22:00 GMT

Procedural Textures

Repeating patterns based on numerical formulas.

If you have any confusions on what these are, do a search and read a little about them on the web. Simplified - computer generated patterns mimicking real-world materials such as stone, wood, marble, etc.

Procedural Textures are your friends!

They wrap around your objects seamlessly (if they are the 3D type) and can add some wonderful looking visual effects to your images. You can scale them and manipulate them in many ways - making therm more dense, less dense, change the color, etc, etc.

Procedural Textures are your enemies!

By their nature, procedurals are a computer generated pattern. We have all seen the computer generated 'natural' materials and quite honestly they can look overly predictable and obviously generated on a computer. The repeating patterns are too symetrical and while some procedurals have capability to randomize their look, they can still look fake and visually boring.

This tutorial will attempt to suggest some ideas on how one might randomize these potentially wonderful procedurals and make them at least a little more believable. These ideas are basically how I would approach the subject and not any attempt on stating the 'right' way to do any of this. This approach works for me ...and I hope you can gain something from it also.

This is the scene from which some of the technique I will be discussing has come from. Download it and have a look at all of the materials and how they were created.

Marbled_Scene.zip

Material Example

MarbleBW_Soft.

These are the objects which use the material in the scene. I am using Rendering Preset P2 for this tutorial - it is used to keep the render speed up.

Let's take one of these objects and start from the beginning - assign an Advanced Brazil Material, set the reflectivity up a little and bring in a Marble Texture into the color slot...and this is what we now have! Somewhat of a bovine looking material:-) Notice how the procedural is mapped on each surface and not 3D looking at all.

The first thing to do is to check the WCS box in the Marble Texture - it's right down near the bottom. It Stands for World Co-ordinate System - XYZ and now maps this texture in 3D to the 'world' of your scene.

Notice the size of the pattern has dramatically changed. It almost looks like a granite.

Scaling the Marble noise

This is the scaling I used for the scene. At times, unfortunately, it is a lot of trial and error to get it to look just right but also allows one to thoroughly grasp the effects of one's actions by examining these changes. One does learn a lot by getting their hands dirty 'so to speak'. The Repeat fields are where one scales the noise to fit the object and the scene. I ended up using .06 in each of the numerial repeat fields. Try some different ones - see what it looks like.

Marble Appearance Settings

Size was left at default of 1.0

Vein width at .31 - this gave me a look closer to what I was after with the veins. Try a few different sizes.

Blur at .51 - the blur effect will harden or soften the transaction from your two colors.

Noise at 3.37 - this control randomizes and adds some nice organic grit to the veins. Too much...and well, it looks like too much!

The results are a little more natural but continue to be predictable in patterning. Our stone is on the way but still looks orderly and procedural - not random and organic enough to sell the look.

When I began putting together the materials for this tutorial I never started out to make a 'marble' material but used the Marble Texture as a building block to making a believeable stone/marble material. I'm quite certain I could have spend much more time fine tuning all of the settings to get a closer reproduction of what a generic marble might look like but, for the purpose of this tutorial, that direction was not followed.

Let's break up these Veins

The Noise Texture in Brazil is great - this one has a variety of different noises within the Texture and gives plenty of control to randomize the look dramatically. So the idea is to break up these veins even more...and also break up the base material too.

We have two color slots in the marble texture. Let's put the Noise Texture into each of these slots and see where it takes us.

Rendering the image - the marbled/veined pattern has disappeared!? This gives up a good clue on how to thoroughly randomize the stone material.

I'm looking for organic grit and detail in my material - right now it's cloudy and smooth so the noise get's boosted, get's finer and.....

...then get's clamped. Scaling to Clamp check-box on lets only a little of the grey noisiness to show. I turned off one of the Noise Textures to have that slot show as black.

The black in the noise texture blends in perfectly with the black of the other color. It could have been any color but I wanted a very high contrasted stone type of material.

I then swapped the color slots (little check-box) in the Marble Texture oo my veins would now contain the clamped noise. A very subtle amount shows.

Similar settings were used for the base of the material - letting just a little of the details to show through thus breaking up the orderly and predictable veining of the Marble Texture.

I'm not going to explain, in detail, the parameters of the Noise Texture - this was never the purpose of this tutorial. In the Noise procedural, the Octaves and Multipliers basically are adding finer and finer detail. The Clamp section flattens the grey range between the darks and lights - bringing out a very contrasty noise pattern. So with the clamp on, you can get bold black and white effects.....clamp off, gives a more subtle 'cloudy' effect. Both extremes are very useful in creating an organic type of material.

This is one Texture which deserves much of your attention and any time spent experimenting will be very wisely spent.

Wrapping up and general ideas

I took one material out of a number to explain my approach to using procedurals when creating stone/rock - all of the materials in the scene are based on this so there is no attempt to explain every single one.

Stacking multiple procedurals gives randomness and an organic quality to the final result. Different sizes of noise adds greatly to creating believeable textures. Hiding predictable procedural patterns with similar coloration (as done here) is a very useful trick - this one goes a long way so I think time spent experimenting will result in some very nice surprises.

Lastly, have fun...step back every now and then and don't let the numbers scare you off:-) Turn those settings and do your tests.....Brazil is a great render! It will reward your efforts.

Brazil Material Library Scene

Pauls — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:33:00 GMT

Brazil for Rhino!

For me, this is a wonderful addition to Rhino - a great render! Very controlable and also very simple to use if some of it's basics are understood. I hope to cover some of these basics and procedures with tutorials and materials demonstrating their use.

A Brazil Material Library.

This is a 'Standardized' scene which can be used as the basis of a Library of Materials for Brazil 4 Rhino. A good, comprehesive material library is important for successful useage of this rendering engine - besides it's a lot of fun to exchange materials with other users.

The scene contains a main material object along with a support object, floor and a number of HDRI's to be used with reflective/refractive materials. This scene has been created with a few choosen Brazil Environments set as presets in order to try the materials under different conditions. I wanted to keep a standard for the scene though obviously you can use what-ever favorite HDRI you may want. These HDRI's are from www.unparent.com and used with generous permission granted.

Download this file - it contains the scene and all of the content used to create the different Environment presets.

http://download.mcneel.com/s3/mcneel/brazil/2.0/beta/en/B4R_Material_Scene.zip

Over the next while I will be writing tutorials and providing examples of some materials - not necessarily run-of-the-mill type of stuff and hopefully will spur on material and rendering ideas which can be shared and exchanged by others. For the time being, material presets will be uploaded to the Gallery section of this site. Click on any image and a link to the actual material can be found in the text area. Questions/comments can be asked there or in the Support Area of this site.

Have some fun with these - soon it will be worked out to have users upload their favorite materials to a specific area of this site.

Chromed Wheel Project

Pauls — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:06:00 GMT

This is a quick example of a chromed wheel based on the request of a user....(read more)