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The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013 8:13 pm
by joaomourao
Procedural textures are a great feature of v3 and we all know NL guys will be working for more kinds of procedural textures in the future, but...
When I look at some of the images made with some procedural textures I feel they are a bit artificial and mathematical. In real life plain colors are uncommon and generally there is always a subtle pattern even for these surfaces, so maybe we could have texture maps for all the available colors inside these procedural materials...
Brick is a nice example...
But what about textures for background color, checker color, circle color, cell color, noise color for Voronoi/Noise/Grid/Circle/Checker procedurals?
And what about textures for start color, mid color, end color for Gradient/Gradient3 procedurals?
Even Marble procedural with its vein colors could have textures instead of color...
Finally just because they all can have it, why not textures for fill color, edge color and coplanar color for the WireframeTexture?
And for the future procedurals coming to v3, every color with texture map also available... please

Cheers!
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013 11:54 pm
by Mihai
Well with a tiny bit of fiddling you could use the checkers as a weightmap to a color texture BSDF which in turn is blended with another plain color bsdf which in turn.....

It's not without flexibility. The system will be improved of course in the future, just that V3 has been out for less than 2 weeks.
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 12:04 am
by joaomourao

sorry Mihai... we know it will be improved for sure, and the possibilities are great!
now with these new windows to edit procedurals and bitmaps, it would be great to have a kind of naming for the title of windows for us to know what we are editing... some smoothing features would also be nice.
sorry... but its christmas and santa is coming soon!

Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 12:47 am
by Maximus3D
I do hope the same procedural package which was implemented into Modo a couple of releases ago gets implemented into a future version of Maxwell 3.0, it's great and very usable for just about everything and anything you can think of. It has a special name that procedural package, i just can't remember what it was now. Maybe someone else remembers..
/ Magnus
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 1:29 pm
by juan
We have plans for improving procedural textures further during 3.x. We will of course improve the current ones and are opened to add more to the list. Besides to this, in the cases where it is possible we will translate procedural textures from native host platforms automatically. We will also expose this API to 3rd parts so they could create their own procedurals.
Thanks,
Juan
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 2:56 pm
by numerobis
I think the limitation to 3 maps for the brick for instance makes it pretty useless (for me).
Maybe you could take a look at Multitexture (
http://www.cg-source.com/multitexture.php), there you can grab just a bunch of textures and you're done - i don't know if there is a limitation... maybe 128, or 256?
http://www.cg-source.com/vidtut_multite ... exture.mp4
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 6:13 pm
by Mihai
I don't think you understood how those three textures are used. For each of them, a random sample is taken from the texture, and you can choose the size of this random pattern. So depending on the size of your original texture and the size of the sample, you could well have over 500 "textures" used for each individual brick.
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 6:43 pm
by numerobis
ahh... ok - so this is indeed a different situation.
But i'm not sure if it is a good solution for structures like bricks or planks with clear defined edges or lets say for structures where the edge looks different to the middle (more compressed etc.) or where different colours have also show different structures. And you always have to make a tileable texture from your template...
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 7:00 pm
by Mihai
Tilable texture from your template? I don't understand....the textures used for the brick procedural don't have to be tilable. The random samples don't cross the texture borders.
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 7:53 pm
by numerobis
maybe i should have said seamless or continuous...
If i have a photo of brick wall (i.e.) and i want to use this with random offset, i will have to remove the joints first, otherwise they will appear on the brick. No? And the same applies to every other structure with clearly defined changes in the texture. If there high contrasted changes in colour or structure i will not be able to use this randomly placed texture without making it seamless, maybe loosing the characteristic structure.
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 8:25 pm
by Mihai
...ok, but it wouldn't make much sense to use a texture of a brick wall, to create a brick wall procedural texture
As the basis for the brick texture, you can have a general concrete texture, tinted etc. That would work great. And also the mortar can be textured separately.
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 8:50 pm
by numerobis
if i have only one or a few photos and not a bigger, correctly alligned and tiled texture or the texture is not big enough or if i need a different bond...
Like i said before, for a generic brick some undefined concrete texture might be ok, but if i have to use some specific brick this will not work.
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2013 3:18 pm
by Half Life
Maximus3D wrote:I do hope the same procedural package which was implemented into Modo a couple of releases ago gets implemented into a future version of Maxwell 3.0, it's great and very usable for just about everything and anything you can think of. It has a special name that procedural package, i just can't remember what it was now. Maybe someone else remembers..
You might be thinking of Substances -- I was hopeful that Maxwell would support Substances myself.
Best,
Jason.
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2013 1:57 pm
by photomg1
Magnus is right , somebody at one point posted a link on the modo forums to a library that modo's procedurals were based on .Can't for the life of me remember the name or find the post now
Not sure whether they were open source or licensed from them.
Re: The future of Procedural textures?
Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2013 2:45 pm
by Maximus3D
Yes, i have a very vague memory of DarkTree being mentioned sometimes. I think Luxology licensed their procedurals years ago to use in Modo. But i wouldn't mind seeing both DarkTree and Substances both implemented into Maxwell Render as they are very powerful procedural packages.
/ Magnus