Need Help with 3 Complex Shaders
Turk_WLF
Posts: 177
I understand the basics of the Shader Tree but I always have a hard time with making complex shaders like
Black Vinyl Cushion, Cargo Webbing & Flat Black Plastic …
Black Vinyl Cushion
http://cotwarehouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/1342796009623-15879020862.jpeg
Cargo Webbing
http://www.seattlefabrics.com/gripper polypro webbing.jpg
Flat Black Plastic
They don’t need to be super detailed (for this time at least) but enough so people will know what it is.
I can’t use a special lighting set-up (if needed) because I’ll be using the item in several different types of scenes.
Thanks,
Post edited by Turk_WLF on
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Comments
Not sure what you're asking, and what issues you're having. Do you need someone to start from scratch on how to make those shaders, or are you looking for some sort of plugin or something?
The only help I can give is to suggest that with the middle one, the webbing, you reference a perfectly good photo you can use in the color channel. It will probably give you far better results than you can get with any complex shader/procedural/plugin stuff.
Hi Turk :)
here's a car file which should provide you with a starting point to create those materials.
the trickiest part to plastics and vinyl is the lighting in your scene and the shape (wrinkles) of the material which pick out the light.
hope it helps
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7907045/exampleshaders.car
JoeMamma2000,
I'm sorry that I didn't make myself that clear. Generally I when I ask for help with shaders like this one, I would like prefer to have someone explain how they do their shaders & I rarely use plug-ins because of their cost.
Like the old saying goes
"Give a hungry man a fish he eats for the day but teach him to fish and he eats for life."
I understand sometimes it's easier just to do the work for them.
3DAGE,
First of all thank you for the example sharders they are great. They're a great guides for me to learn from.
Thanks,
Ahh, okay...
Well, for me the very best way to understand how to do shaders is to actually look, touch, and feel the material. That's why I always suggest people observe the world around them to understand how surfaces really are in real life. See if you have any of those things lying around the house, pick them up, and observe how they are. Are they rough or smooth, are they shiny, what color are they, etc. That's the only way to really learn about materials and textures and shaders. Because the shaders in Carrara, or any other 3D app, are generally modelled after real world characteristics of materials.
That's a real popular topic in this forum, so if you would like further information I suggest you search the archives for the myriad threads on the subject.
Like I said, you have a perfectly good reference photo for your webbing strap, and you can use that in the color channel of your shader to give it the color or the real material. If you also will be using a closeup and might want to see the bumpiness of the material, that the same image can be used in the bump channel to give it some bump. The bump channel will use just the luminosity of the image to determine bump. And if you look at the image you can see that the raised areas are lighter than the hidden areas, which are dark. And that's perfect for simulating bump.
The subject of surfaces and textures is a huge one, so if there's something in particular you need help with then ask. But "how do I do these shaders?" is kind of an open-ended question and would take a whole lot of time to explain. All I can suggest for now is to look at each channel in your Carrara shader, and try to determine which of those characteristics the material has. Color, highlight/shininess, bump. reflection, etc.
I recall your other two materials are pretty much black in color, so you can start with that. And the black vinyl material has very broad specular highlights, so you can use a very light gray for the highlight color and very very low specular value. Just go, one by one, down the channels and dial in settings to see what you get. And ask questions if you get stumped along the way.
By the way, one of the most important tools in the world of textures and shaders is reference photos. You can search the web and download a gazillion photos of all of your plastic/vinyl/webbing materials and use them either as color or bump or whatever images in those channels. It will give you a far better result because it is the actual image, not something that is generated by a procedural that doesn't really describe how the plastic or vinyl is manufactured, etc.
Turk, here's my $.02 on my thought process for making something like the plastic shader for the plastic clip thing you posted (the third one). And I think it also applies to the vinyl too.
First I take the image you posted of the clip and extract a clean section of the texture (see below). I then make an object with rounded edges (very important, since most real life objects have rounded edges that reflect highlights), and apply the texture in the color channel. I also (and this is very very very very important and most people don't consider this) realize that the surface of every object in the universe is UNEVEN, not perfectly flat like in the Carrara modeller. So I subdivide my object and tweak the surface of my cube object using soft select to bulge each face a bit. That gives a nice, uneven surface to reflect highlights.
And BTW, that's why I always recommend that people touch and feel real world objects that they are going to texture. I guarantee 99% of people would make a plastic clip thing (or a floor, or a wall, or a computer screen, or an office desk, or whatever) with perfectly flat sides, and then wonder why it doesn't look very good in the render. Only by holding it in your hand do you realize "hey, it's all curvy and stuff". :) :)
Next I realize that plastic clips like that are kinda rough, so I use the same image applied to the bump channel.
Next I realize that the surface has a VERY broad specular highlight, so I set the specular value as a slider with a super low value (2% maybe). And the specular color is a light gray. And that's about it.
But it's not nearly the end of your job. Because shaders are 75% about the shader, and 25% about the lighting and environment and reflections.
Everything you see in the real world reflects light. So you need to have stuff in your scene that will reflect off your object and SHOW your cool texture. So you need lights. And maybe you need bounce lights to bounce off the floor and light up the texture. And in this place I even used a glow plane in my scene, like studio photographers do, to give a nice broad highlight to reflect.
So here's a render of a simple scene with all of that stuff to give you an idea about how to proceed.
And also BTW, I can pretty much guarantee that everyone here has some of that plastic material used in the clip lying somewhere in your house/apartment/whatever. I have tons of it. Most notably, the plastic case housing the power adapters for my electronics equipment uses that rough plastic material. So you might want to take a close look at it and see what you can learn about it.
Please make your points without gratuitously attacking the rest of us.
Sigh - getting old.
Please make your points without gratuitously attacking the rest of us.
Sigh - getting old.
It wasn't an attack, it was a statement of what I believe to be fact. In all the years I've visited here, I can't recall anyone ever suggesting that anyone study real surfaces, much less explain how to convert observations into shaders. It is NOT a popular topic. If that's offensive then I'm sorry, but it's true.
I don't recall you defending any females, that doesn't make you a hater of women. You made a gratuitous negative assertion about the people on the forum, for which you have absence of evidence, not presence of negative evidence. Furthermore, the statement was completely unnecessary for the point you were making.
Stop making generalizations about other people on the forum. That is simple, isn't it?
Let's be civil, please. Discuss the subject matter without the editorial comments about whether you believe others are or aren't interested in it.
Sorry, my mistake.
Discussions of ways to observe real world textures and convert those observations into Carrara shader settings IS a popular topic here, and everyone is interested in ways to accomplish that.
If anyone is interested in further information, I suggest you search the archives for the myriad threads on the subject.
EDIT: I even edited my original post to fix my error. Sorry to those who might have been offended.
The flat plastic color on those clips isn't really flat. They have a very fine rough surface molded into them. When I used to work for Fiskars our molds had a very similar texture. Anywhere there wasn't a texture came out smooth and glossy looking. If I were to replicate the texture procedurally, I would add a cellular function with the scale of the effect set to 1% or 2% and add it to either the Bump channel or the Highlight channel, then use a numeric slider for the Shininess channel set to around 3% as a starting point. You may need to dial down the brightness of the effect in the Highlight channel as well.
The texture for the webbing would probably be best done using some kind of image map in the color channel and perhaps a grayscale map in the Bump channel and/or Highlight channel perhaps edited a bit to tone down or brighten certain areas to subdue or enhance the bump or highlighted areas.