[Half Life]

Tip of the Day #14

Today's tip of the day will show you how to blend two different images loaded into the reflectance 0 and 90 slots using the R2 parameters.

Step-by-Step:

1) Load two different images into the reflectance 0 and 90 slots and set the roughness to 50 (you do not turn on Force Fresnel for images)
2) Enable the R2 function with setting at 0 and 50 – this will give a 50% blend between the 2 images.

You can lower the R2 roughness to shift the percentage of blend in favor of the reflectance 90 image – conversely you can raise the R2 roughness to shift the percentage of blend in favor of the reflectance 0 image.

The following image shows the R2 roughness set at 0,25,50,75, and 100 in order.

http://www.spotoarts.com/jason/tipoftheday/tod14.zip

You can also adjust the BSDF roughness which will adjust the blending curve. At roughness 50 the gradient between the two images is linear -- however as you lower the roughness the reflectance 90 image will become more dominant and conversely if you raise the roughness the reflectance 0 image will become more dominant.

Best,
Jason.

[brodie_geers]

Tip of Day #15

Today's tip is on Preview Scenes.

Make them. Make lots of them. Often times using just 1 scene with 1 type of lighting just isn't enough to create a material that works in a wide variety of scenarios. Below I'm sharing all of my preview scenes. I just grabbed my whole preview scenes folder so this contains all of the default scenes (some of which have their names changed).

There's no magic to a preview scene. All it needs to be is an .mxs file in your Previews folder. It should have 1 camera, with a square resolution (ie. 500x500px), and wherever you want the preview material to show up in the scene just apply a material that's named Preview.

A brief explanation for a few of the scenes (sorry I was too lazy to label them all in the image but they're basically in alphabetical order and I didn't make an image of the standard Emitter scenes).

Displacement 3inch SubD: Regular floor scene but the plane is divided into 3"x3" planes so you can test displacement on it in real scale (the default scenes don't work well for testing displacement since the scale of them is so small)

Emitter_ies_room: This is a 10'x10' room with the ies light in the center of the ceiling

Grass: Give this a shot when testing thinSSS. The mapping will be off but it'll still give you a good idea of the properties

Simball Color: Gives you a better idea of what colors look like reflecting off of the object

ThinSSS: There's the standard backlit version as well as a frontlit version since it's easy to get your leaf looking right in one scenario and not the other.

Also note that whatever scene is named Defaultpreview.mxs will be your default. In my case I've got the Simball as the default because I find it to be the most versatile.

If you've got a preview that you really like that I missed, please share it in the MXM TOD sign up thread and I'll edit it into this post.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/384281/preview.zip

-Brodie

[Half Life]

Tip of the Day #16

Todays tip of the day builds on tod #14 and #13 to show how to create a complex R2 blended translucent dyed silk material.

As covered in tod #14 you can blend 2 different images loaded into reflectance 0 and 90 using the R2 roughness function in MXED -- but you can also blend the fall-off between those 2 images via the angle function of R2.

Here is the same material with the R2 roughness set to 0 and adjusting the falloff blend 15 degrees per image -- from 0 on the left to 90 on the right:


If we flip the images in the reflectance 0 and 90 slots and repeat the same operation you see how different the results are -- the reason for this is the fall-off will always lean towards the reflectance 0 image more heavily at larger angle settings since the majority of the objects surface we see is facing us.


We can duplicate our BSDF and blend between different R2 falloff angles and roughness settings to create complex visual effects and precisely control how much of which image dominates.


By adding in a thinSSS additive "ghost" layer we can add translucency and even more complexity to this material -- blending images with R2 is a great way to get creative with textile design directly inside MXED.

http://www.spotoarts.com/jason/tipoftheday/tod16.zip

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Tip of the Day#17

Todays tip of the day shows how to get a frosted glass look from AGS.

http://www.spotoarts.com/jason/tipoftheday/tod17.zip


Step-by-Step:

1) Open MXED and activate the AGS wizard
2) Accept the default for "Amount of Reflection"
3) From the type select "Clear"
4) When the color selector pops up switch from RGB to HSV and set the value to 244 and hue and saturation to a pale green/blue color (for normal float glass) or any color you prefer.
5)In the resulting material go to the BSDF in the Specular layer and increase the roughness ( I start with 50).

Optionally: for a bit of a darker look you can adjust the layer opacity values -- up for the Specular layer and down for the the Ghost layer.


Best,
Jason.

[djflod]

wow ... all your tips are so cool and helpful

thank you for your efforts

[gadzooks]

Please keep these coming. Very Helpful!