Everything related to http://resources.maxwellrender.com
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By simmsimaging
#348098
:) I know what you mean. I have spent considerable time working on carpaint shaders (mostly in Vray over the last couple of years but with several engines in my time) and I can feel your pain on it. Maybe NL could weigh in and offer insights on the use of ND and extinction values? The documentation is a bit vague on it....

/b
User avatar
By Half Life
#348119
I think I remember my reasoning pretty well now -- there were several points:

1) the Nd and K are from Gold... the reason I chose Gold is because Gold has the best retention of it's own color of all the metals -- since the point to the RAL lines is the get as close to the target color as possible that was part of it.

I'm not up on the exact physics of why Gold has such a low Nd, I just use the measurements the eggheads in the lab put out there and let them worry about the particulars of it.

Typically you would want to use aluminum with a dye layer to mimic the manufacturing process but obviously Maxwell does not support dye coatings, nor would it allow stacked coatings like you would really want as well... so the Gold was my compromise.

2) The R2 is there to lock the color in as well, because a low roughness object tends to lose color purity/intensity/choma without R2.

Best,
Jason.
User avatar
By simmsimaging
#348120
Thanks for that.

I'd still like to understand the exctinction/ND value relationship a bit better so I'll dig around and see what i can find.

I played with the materials (one of them anyway) last night and was comparing higher ND and lower K values versus what you had done. The difference can be quite subtle so it's hard to really tell what's doing what exactly - but if it works, it works!

/b
User avatar
By Half Life
#349335
I was starting to upload my RAL lines to the material warehouse but the upload mechanism does not allow my naming convention and I refuse to go through over 2000 materials renaming them just to be able to give them away... I'm thinking about setting these up for download via torrent but I've seen that not work so well in the past -- any ideas?

Best,
Jason.
User avatar
By Half Life
#349351
Thanks for the suggestion but I have another 2000+ linked Sketchup materials that would need to be edited as well (with no automatic renaming)... besides it's 2011 why can we not have materials with spaces in the names in today's day and age?

Best,
Jason.
User avatar
By JamesColeman
#349522
Half Life wrote:I'm thinking about setting these up for download via torrent but I've seen that not work so well in the past -- any ideas?
Just curious, why hasn't it worked so well in the past? If it's an ethical issue related to a common use of torrents, that's a tough call, but if it's a seeding issue, I would seed as much as I could and I've got 50+ friends who would do the same, just saying. But it can be a pain when someone repacks it and takes credit :(
User avatar
By Half Life
#349551
I actually have 3 areas of concern with torrent:

1) Seeding has been an issue in the past -- the THINK! site tried to set up some videos for download as torrents but they never got the seeding to make it work (although I see you are willing to help there).

2) I want to retain the ability to control how these are distributed, only because I want to be able to update/upgrade them as needed when new versions of Maxwell are released -- having old versions floating around out there confuses the issue.

3) VTC has a problem with piracy, and it seems my materials are one of the tools they can use to get people to actually purchase a membership... fair or not torrents have a rep as pirate territory. I would like to stay in the good graces of VTC since they do pay me and I like getting paid :D

Best,
Jason.
User avatar
By Half Life
#349707
I changed some things and I was now able to upload the RAL Libraries to the Maxwell resources webpage so these now have a permanent home (where bandwidth is not my concern :wink: ) and I will update them for each new release of Maxwell there (if needed).

With that I can finally close the book on this thread, I've since moved onto developing Maxwell specific materials from Substances and I want to start a new thread to release those because these new Substance-based materials are going to be very cool and much more flexible/dynamic than static MXM's.

Best,
Jason.
By brodie_geers
#349710
Substances look interesting. I'll look forward to seeing what you've come up with.

-Brodie
User avatar
By Half Life
#350650
I wasn't happy with the brushed stainless steels I could find on the Maxwell resources page so I worked on one of my own -- it comes in 2 flavors, bump and displacement... the displacement will result in more realistic renders but will take a little extra time.

An updated version of this material has been made -- see here: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 51#p357351

Best,
Jason.
Last edited by Half Life on Tue Jun 19, 2012 8:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.
By brodie_geers
#350654
Looks like a great material. Can't wait to try it out. Can you talk about how you created it? Did you just start mixing metals or was there some method to your madness?

-Brodie
User avatar
By Half Life
#350656
I had several brushed metals that were either given to me or downloaded from the resources page and I was always feeling a bit unhappy with them so I took some time analyzing a piece I have in my studio and thinking through the brushing process.

Some of my thoughts:

I used the Inox material formula for stainless steel, but I used the wizard metals instead of IOR files.

I used BSDF blending with maps to create stronger anisotropy for deeper grooves and made sure the anisotropy would run with the grooves instead of across them.

I used either global bump or a displacement map so you could change the intensity of the grooves easily.

I'm much more pleased with the outcome of the displacement version personally and it renders pretty quick as well.

Best,
Jason.
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