All posts related to V2
By brodie_geers
#330769
So I've noticed that all of the Arroway materials that come with Maxwell are very similar in there creation. The bump amount is set according to Arroway's recommendation. Everything else seems to be the same whether the material is brick or metal. In particular I'm surprised that the Roughness in the Specular layer is always set to 50. Is there a reason for this?

As I understand it the black in the map is always Roughness 0 and the White in the map corresponds to the number set by the Roughness (ie. 50). If this is the case, it seems like thing like brick would have a higher roughness value set than metal, for example.

Am I missing something?

-Brodie
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By Half Life
#330771
Those aren't actually roughness maps in the Maxwell sense but rather specular maps -- which should be used on a layer with additive mode turned on... I've got a whole set of Arroway materials here:

http://www.spotoarts.com/jason/Maxwell2 ... erials.zip

You have to add the actual Arroway "Texture Pack 1" maps to the appropriate folders but these are all set up to use the specs from the Arroway texture catalogs so that the textures are seen pretty much as close as I could get them to the way they were intended to be used.

The settings themselves can vary quite a bit but all in all it is better to have a correctly adjusted map than it is to tweak out setting in MXED -- and IMHO Arroway did a awesome job in their map creation process.

Best,
Jason.
By brodie_geers
#330772
Glancing through a couple of your materials I see some differences between your setup and Maxwells. Can you explain why you set the settings differently than maxwell? For example in your "shine" layer then ND tends to be 3 (in the files I looked at) whereas I think maxwell favors 1.5. Any reason for the change?

Also you seem to favor 100 in the Roughness slot (again in the Shine layer) rather than 50 (and again it's the same in brick and metal). What's the reasoning here?

You say they're as close as you could get to what Arroway intended. Based on what exactly? Did you adjust the settings based on the arroway file names, which seem to suggest which settings to use but I've never been able to translate those into Maxwell terms.

-Brodie
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By Half Life
#330773
Yes I did base the materials on Arroway's settings but they still have to be interpreted into Maxwell logic -- first thing to say is the Arroway maps that Maxwell supplies are lower rez and have been altered from the maps that come from Arroway... which because of the very nature of the maps will require different settings in MXED.

I base the suggestion that I have come very close on the above, as well as comparing my result with the example renders from Arroway in their catalogs -- but as I said, because of the difference in material creation "concept" it is not a pure 1-to-1 ratio and never will be.

1.5 is the standard ND of glassy-type Fresnel reflections -- 3 (or above) is more standard for solid objects.

100 in roughness with map inverted -- 100 means perfectly diffuse for white areas and perfectly smooth for black areas with most of the important gradation in the grays... combine that with using the same map as a layer mask and in the reflection slots and you get a type of spot varnish effect which simply adds shine to the appropriate place while not changing the color of the image.

Best,
Jason.
Last edited by Half Life on Sat Sep 18, 2010 4:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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By Bubbaloo
#330776
Suggestion:
If you have roughness that is based on a map, and the map contains RGB 0 and RGB 255, you should clamp the RGB values to avoid perfect reflectivity and perfect lambert. Just a small bit (a point or two) to each value. It's always best to avoid the absolute extremes to get a more natural result, because these extreme values do not exist in nature.

Image

Depending on the map, it may not make a huge difference, but it's that little extra fine detail that makes a big difference, right?
By Kyle
#330779
Very good idea Brian, I always do this when defining materials specularity eg use 99 not 100 and use 5-10 not 0 but never thought of doing it for texture maps.
This will definately bring more realism to materials.
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By Half Life
#330781
To clarify, you will never see the rough portions on the specular layer because of the layer mask -- so the Lambert portions will have no effect in the final output.

The bump map will by it's very nature reduce the "perfect" reflectiveness of the smooth areas in most cases and so it's not as much of an issue as one might think.

Also worth repeating, I think a properly made map (in Photoshop or similar) is going to reduce or eliminate any need to tweak image settings in MXED... the need for clamping and the other adjustments is for "quick and dirty" material creation IMHO.

Best,
Jason.
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