Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Hi there..
Does any of you guys know a good workflow for a cookie material?

I am quite sure it has to be a SSS material. Think of holding thin pastries against the light.
Unfortunately I struggle with some issues:

1. My Coefficient is at 8000 and it still does not look dry enough - it looks a little bit as it is dipped in milk:
http://www.directupload.net/file/d/3564 ... hh_jpg.htm

2. I have a enough saturated color map of a slightly tanned cookie, but with SSS it looks too washed out.
Now I have it plugged to the Transmittance. Which seems not right to me, because the color of the cookie is light yellow for the depths and red brown for the heights,
which translates in more transparency in the depths and less transparency in the heights, which makes it look wett I think (the milk goes into the depths).

http://www.directupload.net/file/d/3564 ... 49_jpg.htm
The left cookie has a simple SSS with no color map assigned to it. This one looks better/dryer for me. But I definitely need the color map.
So if I plug it in Reflectance 0/90 of the same BSDF it looks not right, it gets a strange „stiff“ coating, similar to styrofoam.
Same problem if I plug it in a new default BSDF or Layer with less opacity or additive mode (Right Image).
Where should I plug in the color map in a SSS-Material to get saturated, high-contrast colors?


Thanks for your help!

delicious i like it
i think the color of the cookie need more contrast

Saturate the sss chip a little in the first one, and re. mapping use the trans slot (try blurring the map slightly as a speed up because mapping trans is a bit of hack in itself) also try saturating the shadows/crevices of the map as that will make the crevices appear more 'orangey' (trying to get that saturation in the cracks thru sss directly doesnt usually work). You can use the disp map to 'colour burn' the diffuse map.

I also have a hunch that the fat in the cookie will give positive assymetry like 0.1 which will make it look drier.

Heres a material that uses exactly this approach to get more colour in the crevices

eric nixon wrote:Saturate the sss chip a little in the first one, and re. mapping use the trans slot (try blurring the map slightly as a speed up because mapping trans is a bit of hack in itself) also try saturating the shadows/crevices of the map as that will make the crevices appear more 'orangey' (trying to get that saturation in the cracks thru sss directly doesnt usually work). You can use the disp map to 'colour burn' the diffuse map.

I also have a hunch that the fat in the cookie will give positive assymetry like 0.1 which will make it look drier.

Heres a material that uses exactly this approach to get more colour in the crevices

That's the way to go! Cookie looks way better/ more saturated/ less wet. Thanks a lot!!

Here is original image file, because firefox seems to mess up the contrast.. on my screen at least ; http://www.mediafire.com/view/dz9jeqr2d ... ie_dry.png



I had another look at your file, this time in maxwell2, because it appears that displacement is just not working in mw3 yet.

Render time is reasonable, it looks ok at sl8 in which took about 4 mins, bench 292. The render above ran to sl19.44 in 5.5 hrs.

Settings; 1 layer with 80% sss bsdf (attenuation 1.2mm, nd 1.05, coef 7000 assym 0.15) + 20% lambert bsdf. Displacement at 1.5mm with 6 subdivisions. The cookie is 5cm across (I dont know how big its supposed to be)

I made some normal maps too; http://www.mediafire.com/download/lpk69 ... ormals.zip

Very similar material, higher nd 1.25 - (denser bread), with weight-mapped 'crust', sl15 1.5hrs (12c @3.6)

I think it has equal 'realness' in most lighting conditions.

Model by Bertrand Benoit - (turbosquid). Its a very tricky material..,I tried to get the dry white loaf, and the ciabbattta to render but they didnt look real.



I pretty much just used the v-ray maps, made a couple of small changes, and made a weightmap for the crust. Theres no disp because this piece of geo doesn't displace properly,.. cracks everywhere, not watertight. I think its raw photoscan geo.

Eric, that looks like meat loaf.

As long as it looks like something edible, thats good. After a few hours of tweaking these slow renders I was pretty hungry, prob helped the tweaks.

Bubbaloo wrote:Eric, that looks like meat loaf.

Hehe, some people around the world eat other bread than that cotton batting stuff Americans prefer .
That looks like a bread one can buy in many place in Germany.

eric nixon wrote: I had another look at your file, this time in maxwell2, because it appears that displacement is just not working in mw3 yet.

little off topic, but what makes you say that? I use it all the time with no issues beyond the normal.

When you select pretess disp in MW3, at rendertime it actually renders as on-the-fly disp.

eric nixon wrote:When you select pretess disp in MW3, at rendertime it actually renders as on-the-fly disp.

It works here.

Oh, thats odd, I was told it wasnt working.

I'm using the latest plugin and Max 2015.

Yes your right Brian. I just tested a pretess disp directly out of mw3 studio, and it worked, oddly enough I found another bug!, the mw2 material I used had disp set to 0.01, studio opens that with disp at 0.0,, bummer.
These kinds of petty bugs seem to be all over the place in mw3, right now I have so little confidence in it. I certainly wouldnt overwrite any mw2 files, have you noticed that it will erase your global bump map if you open and resave a mw2 material.. evil bugs - you could easily not notice they are there!

Rant over..

edit; I noticed that mw3 studio and mxed default to 1 unit of decimal precision (why) and that is why it reads 0.01 as 0.0, so I set it to 2 units in studio, closed that and now mxed and studio both use the new value. I think it would be better to have a option in the preferences to set these values, and remove all this automated behaviour, its trying to be too clever. Thats how most software works no? If you want to change something permanently you go to prefs, you dont just expect default settings to change because you right-clicked something in the UI.