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Basic Question - Material & Weight

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 8:04 pm
by Primus
Hi

I´m still in learning maxwell renderer. I´m more and more familiar with the workflow in C4D/maxwell. I start now to build up my own materials and i also "study" materials from the maxwell web site. I don´t understand the "weight" feature. I thought its like layers in PhotoShop. I was the opion, that a layer in maxwell material with a weight of 100 is similar to a layer in photoshop with 100% opacity. But i think my understanding is wrong.

Can someone point me in the right direction ?

Best,
Thomas

Re: Basic Question - Material & Weight

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 8:11 pm
by Half Life
An easy way to think of weight is pixels (it's not exactly accurate, but it gets the point across) -- the idea is basically that the BSDF weight value determines how much percentage of the total surface is effected by that particular BSDFs settings... so if you envision a pixel grid only some pixels would have those values and the rest would have the values of the other BSDF(s) -- but when you zoom way out it looks like a smooth mixture.

Perhaps this video can help as well: http://think.maxwellrender.com/_368.html

Best,
Jason.

Re: Basic Question - Material & Weight

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 8:39 pm
by Primus
Ok, i think i get it, thank you Jason. I was on the trip that the weight is a kind of opacity. But know i understand, its a kind of mixture, e.g. two BSDF one 100% red, one 100 % green, both a weight of 100 , result is yellow. ;) But with these basic i get it. I under stand the concept now, its difficult when you have complex materials , but that´s life.

All the Best,
Thomas

Re: Basic Question - Material & Weight

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 8:43 pm
by Bubbaloo
Also, realize that layer opacity is different than BSDF weight.

BSDF weight will control the percentage of influence within a single layer with more than one BSDF.

Re: Basic Question - Material & Weight

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 8:48 pm
by Half Life
Yeah, if can be hard to dissect other peoples materials because there's no telling what their mindset was or what the rules (of the Maxwell version) they were working under... generally I find BSDF blending to be most useful for creating metals. Polishing/buffing metals can introduce a small amount of anisotropy to an otherwise smooth appearing surface and BSDF blending allows us to have both properties going on at the same time(smooth and rough).

See this tut: http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 82#p337382

Best,
Jason.