Maxwell Render | Official public forum

In all the time testing 2.0, I never got to fully re-texture my R2-D2, which I've been wanting to do.

The image below, having just started, still contains 4 major improvements thanks to 2.0:

1) The aluminum is vastly improved. 1.x had an issue where shiny objects would have a darkening at the edges, regardless of how high the nd was set. This is totally fixed in 2.0, so the metal looks much more natural.

2) Stacked layers make doing the "damage" really simple: the painted panels have a complete aluminum material on them, covered up by the paint shader, which is then easily "scratched" off with an Opacity Mask, which I can tweak easily.

3) The improved Spectral>RGB means I was able to nail the specific blue I was after right off the bat with no tweaking.

4) 15 minutes for this render test, on my shiny new Mac 8-core Nehalem.




This will be fun!


_Mike

mverta,

would you be willing to share the maps you' used for any part of this? I'm interested to see the individual maps and how they affect the material as a whole.

-Brodie

Thanks to the new Image Controls in 2.0, there's only one map used for the entirety of the 4-layer aluminum material. I began by photographing my real R2 dome, and then stitching together the 360-degree photos into a map for spherical projection. An early version of the map seen here:



I would simply make brighter versions for the Refl90 channels for example, and then desaturated, de-contrasted versions of the map for the roughness channels. The 4 layers for the material are Edge Reflection (heavily .r2 controlled for reflection kick at edges), "Narrow" anisotropic reflection, "Wide" anisotropic reflection, and an overall, isotropic base reflection.

Another great byproduct of 2.0's image controls is that by needing fewer texture maps to make the materials, my memory consumption is a fraction of what it used to be.


_Mike

wow, very interesting (and I don't just mean the fact that you have an r2d2 head lying around at home!), thanks!

-Brodie

Hard to believe that it could better ..., but yep, that metal is just hyper-convincing.

Very nice Mike ..

Extremely impressed Mike, stacked layers are such a breeze! really fantastic how this looks now

Honestly, before stacks, it would take me weeks to do a material properly, with multiple BSDF's of metal, paint, dirt, fingerprints, smudges, etc. And even then it never quite looked right because I simply couldn't keep track of all the things I needed to compensate for in the various weightmapping maps. It just basically wasn't possible to do properly, but I gave it my best shot and had insanely complicated materials. All in all, that ended up taking R2 about a year of work, on and off, to finally feel good about. So far, my average time to recreate a material from scratch properly, is about 7 minutes with 2.0.

So that's not even in the same universe, workflow-wise. From a complex material building standpoint, that means Maxwell 1.x was basically from the Stone Age. Sorry, but that's just how it feels from my chair.


_Mike

It looks good already, as always. What i'm curious about is in what way these stacked layers helps you create the shaders in a way you could not do it with some 1.7 magic ? maybe it would help the explanation if you showed off your shader for the aluminium so we can see how you stacked it up..

It would also be interesting to see what else you can produce with Maxwell besides this astrodroid which we've seen now for a few years. It's about the only thing i've ever seen from you.

/ Max

The dome looks just perfect!

I think those image controls were already in 1.7, right? Are you talking about saturation, brightness, contrast, clamp, invert,...?

Maximus3D wrote:It would also be interesting to see what else you can produce with Maxwell besides this astrodroid which we've seen now for a few years. It's about the only thing i've ever seen from you.

/ Max

Well I've got a nice render of your mother I'm working on.




But other than that, the answer to your question is that stacked layers make things like multiple-layers-of-varying-levels-of-dirt-and-grease-on-paint-scratched-off-to-reveal-metal a breeze, while this was practically impossible with 1.7

Fernando: no, image controls were not available in 1.7 for Maya users, anyway. Huge time saver over here, but nowhere like stacks themselves.

_Mike

My mother ? pfft, you're not skilled enough to pull that off.

Hm i see, so it resolves issues with multilayered shaders you say you could not create with 1.7, alright that sounds nice! however i have to disagree with you that such materials were pretty much impossible to create with 1.7, just have a look at the one's i built for 1.7, all of them are multilayered and many with multiple levels of scratches, wear n tear and much more. I'd say it is possible with 1.7, it may just require more work and planning but it can be done.

/ Max

You can do decent approximations, obviously. You can't have an entire component, say the surface dirt on a material, that has it's own complete set of varying levels of roughness, transparency and reflectance, which interacts with or partially obscures other layers with equal complexity. There are some materials that are practically impossible, and then there are some that are literally impossible. You cannot, with 3 bsdfs, create complete isolation for each component. You can play grayscale games with your weightmaps to try and approximate isolation, but it's not the same.


_Mike

Nice going Mike! Would it be possible that you can post screen shots of the stack layers of the metallic blue material!? I would really appreciate it only if you don't mind Thanks!

Max, you can paint it pixel by pixel in PS, too. But, this doesn't change the fact stacked layers is far superior and flexible than weight maps.

looking good.
are you still using a .r2 file?
or are they still available/necessary in 2.0?