Collab 2021W08 - Modern Art of Materials Museum

bOBaN · February 25, 2021, 8:38am

It’s actually hard to talk about the maps without not referring to how they are used in rendering. And I think that’s why “bump” is no longer used as it makes things a bit ambiguous.

Bump mapping (as used by rendering engine) was an old technique for normal mapping (using just 1 8bit channel). I don’t remember now the exact computational algorithms, but it was called Blinn algorithm IIRC. The rough idea was that you actually tried to calculate a normal map just with height information. I remember implementing this algorithm in c++ while doing my msc in CS (and in my “previous” life I did have an episode that I taught entry level computer graphics at local Uni for CS students).

Jaco_Pretorius · February 25, 2021, 8:20am

Correct… Effectively, when you plug a height map into a Bump Node you are telling Blender to use that height map as a bump map.

bOBaN · February 25, 2021, 9:05am

And to make things more confusing to Kartik I’ve used all kinds of maps in shaders to do things they weren’t intended to be used for. I even remember that I used base color map to drive displacement or roughness (after doing some transformation on them).

Jaco_Pretorius · February 25, 2021, 9:07am

Nothing wrong with that… its why nodes are awesome

Kartik_Nair · February 25, 2021, 12:46pm

phew, all of that, went over my head, I really don’t understand any of those right now, basically confused with what each does. I should give more time to this topic. Thanks @Jaco_Pretorius for the that explanation about the difference, and @bOBaN for the links.

bOBaN · February 25, 2021, 1:00pm

This is not trivial topic, after doing some more learning you’ll wrap your head around it

Kartik_Nair · February 25, 2021, 1:25pm

Popping up one more:
Making a gold material, the part I know is I have to make it 100% “metallic”, less “Roughness”, and a lil bit of “clearcoat”.
The part I don’t get is, what are “specular” and “sheen” doing?

NP5 · February 25, 2021, 1:45pm

LOL I am down here looking up with you!

bOBaN · February 25, 2021, 3:21pm

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/shader/principled.html

All of the input described there

I never used those inputs in Blender though. From what I understand specular is for highlights. I might be wrong on this one, but it might be for specular workflow (in contrast with metalness workflow). Sheen…

Kartik_Nair · February 25, 2021, 5:13pm

Oh I’m not speaking with respect to Texture, it’s from the materials.

bOBaN · February 25, 2021, 5:17pm

Yes, the first link explains materials, the second - workflow. And textures and materials are kind of bound together (you make textures to feed into your materials).

bOBaN · February 25, 2021, 10:30pm

It seems that it’s not crashing, but it just has terrible UI bug. When doing some heavy calculations in the background - it freezes the engine for a few minutes (5-10) and then works. Workaround: adjust all stuff with small texture size, and for final shot crank up their resolution. 1k resolution for working seems to have acceptable delays, but I’ll use 512x512 just in case (as I bet that the more I learn designer the more complex they will get).

Edit: another workaround:

Export textures directly to project folder somewhere and while exporting mark it as ‘auto update’ (even 4k is ok)
Setup material in unreal manually
Adjust parameters directly in designer

Strange that going through filesystem is quicker than using official plugin.

bOBaN · February 27, 2021, 1:35am

Ugh… finished brick material. Started with some old tutorial, which kind of worked, but didn’t produce great results. Tried to tweak it myself… The result is not bad, but somehow I don’t like it…

And in unreal showing some of the parameters (4 color schemes based on colors from different brick walls).

NP5 · February 27, 2021, 2:23am

Procedural bricks?
Too shiny, in that bricks are very very not shiny?
Something is odd even the bricklaying is wonky.

Image texture instead?

Or my way, individual bricks all very very gently randomised.

bOBaN · February 27, 2021, 2:28am

Roughness is easy to fix :-).

The idea is to not use image textures or model bricks. That’s too obvious and too easy

But on a serious note, the premise is to create one generator that will be able to quickly create any possible variation of a brick one can imagine

NP5 · February 27, 2021, 2:40am

bOBaN · February 27, 2021, 9:17am

You basically explained procedural generation in one picture

bOBaN · February 27, 2021, 10:49am

Adjusted the roughness:

This is the controls I have over it:

and this is an output map with current params:

And this iss whole material:

NP5 · February 27, 2021, 11:44am

Stick to proper Blender texturing.

For my eye, the brickwork not being a proper bond, properly regular, hurts the eye, even before the underground public toilet glazed brick like smoothness of surface, even if the glaze is now matt.

I know it is only a test soft cube but how would the corners ever be built like that, given you can not get a proper corner even by moving the uvs or mapping sideways, because the bond pattern is not there.

If it is to be a distant effect then the surface will not matter. But the pattern might.

I also do not like the curvy ‘damage’? lines. May just be me but I can not recall ever seeing such effects, which does not mean they are not out there somewhere.

bOBaN · February 27, 2021, 12:11pm

No way

But on a more serious note, it’s not feasible in the long run (it’s not about those bricks only, but all the textures). I’m learning this with “making indie games” in mind. It will not be possible for me to spent couple of hours on each brick wall… and even if I had a team of artist at my disposal that doesn’t really scale. No wonder why 95% of game studios use substance (adobe’s claim, I have no data to back it up - but I don’t even recall a gdc talk about the art side of a game that substance wasn’t mentioned).

Edit: maybe with geometry nodes or houdini one could make workflow for bricks better

I will hide it Putting some columns or wooden beams or something. Real life bricks have similar problem

But that actually gave me idea for further work… First look at maps from scanned data, then try to replicate it as well. You know - having in the reference not only pictures of a surface I’m trying to replicate it, but also maps created while scanning similar surfaces (e.g., from megascans).

Those are bricks from my friends house:

And when I look at my references there are more examples like that with loads of different shape.

Thanks for the feedback! I will later improve the pattern latter. Now I’m tryigng to assemble the scene, as just couple of hours left

Just quickly modeled some pieces:

Need to approach it iteratively: first pass to have something, and than go again and improve everything.