I know I say this quite a lot, but now more than ever… WELCOME BACK!
It’s been twelve days since the last blog post, and no, my computer hasn’t been rendering for those 12 days straight. But alas, I have used some of that time to do that too! In this episode, we are going to take a look at how to set up a material with the textures we’ve created – in VRay no less. This process will be similar in other render engines, such as Mental Ray, RenderMan, Octane… so let’s get started and have some fun!
On this very special occasion, I’m going to use a combination 3DSMax and VRay. So far we’ve used Maya as our 3d software, but just to spice things up and use something new, let’s go with Max! Also, I can’t hide my love for that software, since as an Archviz artist I’ve been using it for quite some time now. In spite of this, please keep in mind that everything we cover in here will work exactly the same in any other application you might be using – after all, we are just connecting textures to the correct material slots in the render engine. Let’s see how it works!
So first things first: let’s open Max and set up VRay as the render engine – or whatever engine you like. Again, the principles are the same across many applications. Once there, let’s take a look at the material editor. Or the ‘Hypershade’ if you are in Maya. The things that make up any material are the different ‘nodes’, categories or parameters that can be found inside them. The diffuse slot, roughess, reflection, glossiness, highlight glossiness, bump, displacement, opacity… and we can go on! Refraction, anisotropy, translucency…!
Luckily, we’ll only need to modify some parameters. Those will be the ones we have created maps for – diffuse, roughness, reflection, glossiness and highlight glossiness, bump and displacement. Pretty much any material in any render engine has those attributes, which can in turn be modified. If you have only started to use these types of textures only recently, don’t worry – we don’t have to modify every single slot of the wide range an engine offers, just the ones that make up the image. For example, for the tiles we have created, we won’t need to use translucency since that’s not a visible property of the material.
Now that we know this, let’s see what textures we have created so far and what material slot we need to apply them to:
1/ Diffuse slot
Colour texture: This map will be used in the diffuse slot, since the colour information of the material lives here.
Ambient occlusion: Another map that will affect the diffuse channel, combined with the colour texture. To do so, a composite map can be placed in said material channel to have both textures used, with the AO map on top and multiplying by 10 to 40% the base texture – which will be the colour one.
2/ Roughness
Roughness: This texture receives its own channel inside the VRay render engine. On other software, it might be used as a mask in the specular width slot. Just remember to use it in a place where it affects the blurriness of the glossiness.
3/ Glossiness
Glossiness: To be used in its own channel.
4/ Highlight glossiness
Highlight glossiness: Same as the one above, use it in its own channel if your render engine is VRay. In Mental Ray, I often mix it with the glossiness to get finer control over the reflections.
5/ Bump
Bump: as with the glossiness, it is used in its own slot across many different render engines. A very popular texture, there’s usually no problem finding its channel. Before we move on, keep in mind that the values for this map aren’t usually set to 100%. Most of the times it’s a lower value – just try and see what looks nicer. For this example, I’ve used a value of 40.
6/ Displacement
Our jewel in the crown, what we’ve worked so hard to achieve: In VRay, there’s a slot waiting for this texture to be placed. If you are working with Maya and Mental Ray, beware! It’s not as straightforward in this case, but not too difficult either. The next very brief tutorial from Autodesk themselves will tell you how: click here!
In a similar fashion as what happened with the bump mapping, displacement values aren’t usually left at 100. In fact, such a number would be an extremely high value. As with anything else, tweak it until the results are nice, but start really low. For the tiles example I’ve gone with 10, and I don’t usually type anything beyond 15 for any project I do.
So we’ve done it! After setting all of the above in motion, we can render an image and take a look at the results. Let’s see!
And do you know what’s even more amazing than the image – that is, if you find a tiled floor to be amazing – ? To me, it is the number of polygons used to recreate that detail. 1.
No, it’s not 1 000 000, or 100 000… not even 10 000, 1 000, 100 or 10. It’s just one polygon. And all of that detail. See it for yourselves by taking a look at the wireframe.
Wow! To me, it is really nice to be able to implement something like the above in an archviz project, or in a game engine. Now that we’ve walked this path together, I hope you are ready to start creating your own textures and rendering your own results. It’s a really nice process, and as you’ve seen, the results can also be quite nice!
From now on, and as we’ve finished this ‘creating displacement textures’ series, we are going to move on to the next one: real time archviz. It’s been a pleasure to have done these entries for the past two months, and the next series are going to cover real time rendering. We’ll cover a wide range of features – photogrammetric scanning of a bedroom for real time visualization, the creation of a project in both 3DSMax and Unreal Engine 4… it’s going to be cool!
I hope to see you there, but until then, have a great time!
Cheers!
Brais Brenlla 