[fuso]

You are welcome I meant to post these to the forum earlier but it slipped my mind until you asked about it.

Best,
Jason.

Hi Jason, those materials really are amazing, I'm having lots of fun browsing and using them on little test scenes. But just out of
curiosity, the folder 'Arroway full rez' contains plenty of materials whith missing textures. Is one supposed to purchase these or
are they part of the maxwell Arroway freebies, which currently seem to be missing from the installed database?

Anyway, thanks again for sharing this lovely package!

[Tok_Tok]

You can get the Arroway material pack at the MXM Gallery.
That makes me wonder, are you going to upload your material packs to the MXM Gallery, Jason?

[Half Life]

The arroway material pack on the MXM gallery is not compatible as they are not full rez and the maps have been changed in some instances -- for my Arroway materials you must purchase these:

http://www.arroway-textures.com/en/products/edition-1

Once you have the full-rez textures just drop them in the same folder as the MXM's -- there are 2 versions of each MXM, one with Realscale (meter) tiling settings in the MXM and one for use with plugin systems (like Sketchup) that set the tiling in the application (MXM tiling of 1 and 1 relative).

Some of these materials are on the gallery -- but as I say, I try to give alot of materials with my training videos as a means of helping my viewers build a quality basic library from the start... but because I do add them as a important part of my training as a "value added" asset I don't want to undercut my employers by posting them all permanently to the gallery.

I don't mind posting them here until the videos come out, because most longtime users are here sharing valuable assets and information as well...

Best,
Jason.

[Polyxo]

Hello Jason,
I just wanted to thank as well. That is a huge and very useful collection!
Also many thanks for your Daily Tip-Series (this also applies to anyone who contributes).
I'm glad that such a nice guy has taken over the Maxwell-Education - Nextlimit should really
consider paying you for the continuous Support-Job you are doing.

Holger

[fuso]

Hello Jason,
I just wanted to thank as well. That is a huge and very useful collection!
Also many thanks for your Daily Tip-Series (this also applies to anyone who contributes).
I'm glad that such a nice guy has taken over the Maxwell-Education - Nextlimit should really
consider paying you for the continuous Support-Job you are doing.

Holger

I couldn't possibly agree more!!

[Chris Krüger]

The arroway material pack on the MXM gallery is not compatible as they are not full rez and the maps have been changed in some instances -- for my Arroway materials you must purchase these:

http://www.arroway-textures.com/en/products/edition-1

Once you have the full-rez textures just drop them in the same folder as the MXM's -- there are 2 versions of each MXM, one with Realscale (meter) tiling settings in the MXM and one for use with plugin systems (like Sketchup) that set the tiling in the application (MXM tiling of 1 and 1 relative).

Some of these materials are on the gallery -- but as I say, I try to give alot of materials with my training videos as a means of helping my viewers build a quality basic library from the start... but because I do add them as a important part of my training as a "value added" asset I don't want to undercut my employers by posting them all permanently to the gallery.

I don't mind posting them here until the videos come out, because most longtime users are here sharing valuable assets and information as well...

Best,
Jason.

A bit off topic, but when are the new training videos coming out? I already own the first ones, Wich really are amazing

Chris

[Half Life]

Thank-you all

The next course to be released is the Google Sketchup to Maxwell Render Workflow series which features the new plugin and bridges the gap between my Sketchup Training series and my Maxwell series.

Right now I am working on a ZBrush training series which will tie in to my Glaug project: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 48&t=36013 and show how to layout UV's, age/texture/detail and paint several variations of Glaug in ZBrush for rendering in Maxwell. (I'll also touch on some organic modeling/sculpting technique as well)

After that I have a 2D graphics software project planned -- and after that hopefully by the end of this year Maxwell 3 will be released and will be my next project

I've got some cool stuff planned using Substance Designer and I will be releasing many free substances here (with instructions on how to Maxwellize them) as well as including alot of them in my planned Maxwell 3 files... if you don't know Substance Designer check this:

http://www.turbosquid.com/Substance

and this:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Allegorithmic

I do have to "pitch" new titles to VTC so it always helps when users send them notes or submit votes here: http://www.vtc.com/modules/products/tit ... opment.php for more Maxwell related series...

In the future I would also like to tackle various issues like the Photoshop and After Effects plugins and post productions techniques with Maxwell, Realflow integration in Studio, and the Network system... some of which may be best suited for the THINK! site.

Now we need a new car paint render!

Best,
Jason.

[3dtrialpractice]

wow that new RAL carpaint render looks fantastik! --honestly if it seems too dark of a color.. i think it could be bumped up a bit in photoshop and then it'll probably be perfect..

Jason:
Thank you for the very generous DL of materials (and all the great work withthe videos and mxmTOTD)

I looked at the carpaint material.. cant beleive its only base layer with a coating..

The Nd of the baser is set to 0.29 (witha K of 2.670) Where did ya get those number from? car paint nd reference anywhere? seems like too specific from doing trial and error.. as .0x settigns of either Nd and K seems way too little change between values to detect with the eye..

even before i watched your videos (on think site) I noticed that in maxwell2.5 we can set Nd below 1... and yours is set to 0.29
but trying to understanding why this works on car paint.. I thought metals where higher Nd? (but I have always noticed that carpaint falls off to very darkness)
is that why the Nd is below 1.0 so it makes the color drop off to a very dark on the rim (and the K bumps up the power of the specular reflection?) (and then the coating takes care of the carpaint fresnel gloss look?)

any insight or extra feedback would be cool

[Half Life]

The real-world composition of metal flake car paint currently has no analog in Maxwell materials and the reason is that the "paint" is really composed of submaterials (or particles if you prefer) that Maxwell cannot recreate as of today.

The "flake" is actually made up of small mica or aluminum particles which are often coated -- to truly re-create these we need some system to assign IOR data to the actual "flakes" AND to the coating(s) of the flakes as the base material... and then some system to define how they are arranged on the surface.

This is sort of a subset of the problem I encountered when trying to make my RAL Anodized Aluminum material -- in the case of anodized aluminum you do have aluminum, but is has been micro "etched" to create a surface that will accept and retain a dye coating... the net result of which is that using a Aluminum material would not yield the desired results because it would be too reflective to mimic this processing and we have no means of creating a dye coating layer in Maxwell anyway.

So I chose the Metal Wizard "Gold" as my metallic base material because Gold reflects it's own color very strongly -- combining golds natural tendency to reflect it's own color with the R2 parameters ability to lock in a color at low roughness and you have a reasonable mimic of a dyed aluminum surface... after that is was simply a matter of mimicking the combination of the roughness of the aluminum with the shine of the topcoat/final processing via BSDF blending.

Since I achieved the "flake sparkle" look of the RAL Carpaint through anisotropy and angle I could just take a single anodized aluminum BSDF and coat it to get a reasonable mimic of carpaint.

The primary advantage of this formulation is by simple manipulation of the roughness parameter of a single BSDF you can adjust any color in the RAL Carpaint line between metallic and non-metallic variants... the secondary advantage is the color is very predictable and fairly accurate which is important if you purport to be basing the MXM line upon a established color standard

For the falloff the critical element is the Nd of 1.491 which is the Nd of clear acrylic -- I used this for the coating to get the falloff of the material correct with a coating thickness of 25 microns which is what my research told me was the best median value for a car-paint topcoat.

I would re-iterate that this is just a mimic, and that a proper carpaint material is beyond the capabilities of Maxwell today, but hopefully those issues will be addressed in future releases

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I just found another reference for car paint clearcoat thickness, this came off a forum so I'm not sure as the reliability of it but here it is:

1 mil = 0 .001", 1000th of an inch or 25.4 µ. As a point of reference a sheet of copy paper is 3.5Mil (89 µ) One micron is roughly 1/80th of the thickness of a human hair (hair thickness depends on hair colour/ethnic origin etc)

Most vehicle paint film systems (127 - 178 µ) which comprise a Primer coat of 2Mils (50 µ) and a Colour coat of 1-2Mils (25 -50 µ) and Clear coat 2-3Mils (50 - 75 µ) a surface scratch that will `catch' your fingernail is approximately 0.04 Mil (1.0 µ) deep will usually require wet sanding and refinishing.

Generally speaking the clear coat makes up 50% of the total paint thickness. The paint system is split 50-25-25% please note that this is a very general approximation

Measure the inside of door; this will give you an approximation of the paint system minus the clear coat. The difference between readings inside the door and on the exterior paintwork gives the thickness of the clear coat )it should be noted that some vehicles do have a clear coat)

Removing more that 0.5 mil (12µ) of clear coat will cause premature paint film failure as the ultra violet (UV) protection percolates to the top of the clear coat, there is ultra violet (UV) protection all the way through the paint, but the majority of it migrates to the top of the clear coat along with the thinner solvents and particles. Therefore removing clear coat ultra violet protection is not a linear process; by removing a small percentage of the clear coat paint tends to remove a larger percentage of UV inhibitors. So once you remove too much clear coat you'll have no paint UV protection other than what you apply with a LSP

As a point of reference a sheet of copy paper is 3.5Mil (89µ) a surface scratch that will `catch' your fingernail is approximately 0.004 Mil (0.01µ) deep will usually require wet sanding and refinishing.

According to that information the coating should be twice as thick as it currently is -- I ran a test of that and the only difference I can see with the naked eye is it looks to be slightly darker at the edges...

You may want to test that on your cars when rendering

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Last call for these materials... I'll be taking the link down in a day or so.

Best,
Jason.

[JamesColeman]

Last call for these materials... I'll be taking the link down in a day or so.

Best,
Jason.

Whoa, thanks Jason!