Decorated pig

misoversaturated, where did you get your knowledge of the nodes?

Just trial and error, learning by doing.

The node system logic is straightforward, most parameters (val) require an input between black and white (0-100%); some (color) have three values (rgb or xyz).
Going from there you can use the math nodes to get nearly any effect you want.
All the properties in the material node can be independently mixed, so you can use masks to get different qualities on different areas.

Studying the examples in this thread helps a lot.

Problems arise from missing shaders (volumetric emission, absorption and scattering, single sheet translucency etc) and missing properties of the state node like ray length, local and global position and rotation etc.

Especially the fractals are great, when I try to create something similar in blender and take up its musgrave texture I always fail :rolleyes:
 
Well, some problems could be solved, if we could mix shaders in layers.

Thanks for your answer. The funny part is, you don't tell me anything new there as you probably knew all along.

With trial and error I get most problems solved. And in all modesty, I'm far, far away from being stupid. But never ever I could have come up with something like your second solution. It shows a deep understanding of the shaders.

To me you're a certified shader genius.

Now, in the material compartment Cheetah is a bit weak. Other software packages have hundreds or thousand of materials to download. It would be a good idea, having a part of this forum devoted to that (more than this thread).
 
Thanks :smile:

Concerning a mat library, that was not really effective for the not-physically-based Cheetah renderer because each material had to be tweaked to work with the actual lighting.
The same material with a skylight instead of a HDRI would simply not work without heavy adapting.

This should get better with Falcon once Martin has finished the engine and the lights.

The remaining problem then is the scaling.
Because of the arbitrary units it is difficult to specify for which scale a material is actually meant on a given object.
Normally you would tweak the scale in the mat tag to adjust a given material to fit your object.
 
Scaling is not a problem. That can easily be explained to newbies. It sometimes can be time consuming.

The tweaking of the material can sometimes still be a problem, even in falcon (because one get's it not 100 % right, only fitting to the situation).

But reading the questions here, a lot of people seem to have trouble with materials, and I understand it. Over the years I used or tested some renderers and the only point where I think, cheetah is more difficult than others, are the materials. They are the weak point of cheetah in my opinion, especially the procedurals. For example wood doesn't imho look like wood.

For me the solution is almost always the same (except glass): a combination of textures and procedurals (which is the reason why I couldn't give away my materials. They're worthless without the pictures). I almost always use some bump texture.

But procedural materials make life easy. Texturing is an art in itself and it's very time consuming, especially, when you paint. And UV-Mapping can be a pain, too (at least that works quiet well in cheetah. I would like, if I could export to something else than pdf, though –*after creating I usually have to edit the texture to fit it again).

So more procedurals to start with would make the life more easy. In all other packages I looked at, you had quiet a few good materials you could use just out of the box. And even professionals use them as starting points for more complex solutions. And here we could help a little bit, I think, with building up a library.
 
Pig in the rain

Not perfect, but a start.

  • The water on glass pig is a bump map I drew of water droplets in Photoshop. The bump method is a compromised method, I think. The water drops have the same index of reflection as the glass material, so they have the wrong index of reflection, and tend to look like part of the glass.
  • The water on block is a combination:
    • Relief objects sitting overlapping the wood box. The relief object is modeled with texture map I drew in Photoshop, and has water dielectric material applied
    • The wood box material has been modified with a bump map and math node combined with the wood image mapped to the reflection input of material.
  • The falling rain uses an array of sphere primitive with water material. (The array of falling rain triples the .jas file size because I burned the array to apply the rigid body physics to get the blur.)

Files: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8985204/pig_in_the_rain.zip
 

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Very nice jdmac! I've been working with nodes and procedural textures to try and get condensation via bump map with water shader, but I haven't managed anything as good as you got yet.

Can you share your material or material settings?
 
Pink pig after the rain

Pig_1: Pink
Pig_2: Water drops

  • Duplicated pig model for water drops (Pig_2)
  • Shell tool ... ~0.001 on Pig_2
  • Commit modifier
  • Deleted outer shell of new pig, and flipped remain normals to face outwards
  • Now we have same pig, slightly smaller (there may be an easier way)
  • Used reverse of bump map as a displacement map on Pig_2
  • Applied water material

Note that the displacement map I made is not quite clean ... there's a noticeable step around some of the drops. Overall, I think the technique can work.
 

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Cleaned-up the displacement map ... results in better separation between water drops and pig.

The sub-mesh with the displacement is too close to the outer pig mesh ... crossover seen in ears.

(Render: Falcon, 800 samples)
 

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Nice job 'jd'... I like the water very much.
Looks like you've almost got it down!
:icon_thumbup: :icon_thumbup:
 

That's really great work. The drops can also imply scale,
smaller drops will make the pig look bigger and visa-versa.

 

The drops can also imply scale,
smaller drops will make the pig look bigger and visa-versa.

The drops on the pig are a bit big; it was a huge down pour :)

I wasn't sure the scale of pink pig, but I suppose the wood grain gives some reference.
 
Yes, not only a great render, but also shared the files to work out how it's done.

Add me to the chorus of praise. Thanks matey.
 
Superb! :icon_thumbup:

I think we tried Cloth but nothing really came of it. That would be a good one for the collection. :smile:

Cheers
Terry
 
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