Ok, opening up this thread for all to contribute your methods to this. My interest and curiosity was piqued when IRML uploaded some examples within Lightwave here.
I will attempt to replicate it if in a simplistic nature in Arch Design materials for Mental ray and 3dsmax. (2010-) Nothing saying others cannot post their solutions. I will also try to convert this to scanline or standard max materials too. I have only attempted one proper TMP era ship so I never really though about how to replicate this effect properly. Always it has been a compromise of complexity.
Right now this is what I have. It is a cobbled collection of mix materials in the reflective color slot in arch design. Each mix contains one mix material and a fall off each containing one of 4 colours. blue/gold gold/blue green/pinkred pink red/green
so
mix
stacked like so. with a checker bitmap to mix them.
I then have a gray scale checker in the aniso rotation slot and have aniso cranked up to 3 or so.
As you can see the animation lacks compared to IRMLs example even considering the lack of texture complexity, just the pearl effect itself lacks. Or seems to. I am by no means a expert on materials.
hah anyone remember the code to make it so youturd doesn't show related videos??? My old method seems broken.
Each day we draw closer to the end.
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What I do not like about both of these is the flip of colour happens on all layers at the same angle. This is where I have not been able to figure out how to get this aniso rotation effect to apply individually to each separate fall off. I could be way off in using the method I am to get the solution.
I dunno why youturd made this look like a low colour image. . . ugh.
Uses that same stacked fall off mix thing.
I'll see if I can replicate what you did...
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When I push that button this comes up:
Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 12GB
1TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 1GB SATA SSD, 4TB external HDD
32 GB RAM
Windows 11 Pro
The drop down menu for alignment has Automatic, Camera, Map Channel, Radial, and Radial/Planar.
Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 12GB
1TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 1GB SATA SSD, 4TB external HDD
32 GB RAM
Windows 11 Pro
Now time to try a more complex map and explore if there is some other way to do what is seen on IRML's animation.
Early chart showing how the last few a+d materials were set up. The grain or noise in the reflection is due to a low sampling setting.
It is all still beta, in a way since I am still blundering about.
KIM settings fine details and even things like the fall offs are all exp, and quick set up to test theory.
The scanline one is similar in process and I should have a chart up soon too.
Then back to experimenting.
Normal maps, I do not know if I can apply it like I think your saying. If I stuck one in that slot it would just use the normal map as a bitmap. I do have a normal bump shader but it does odd things. Something I have to experiment with.
I stuck all the previous stuff in the above flow chart into the shader and got that. lol
Damn ok I know why now, that is to create normal texture maps in ortho to project onto low poly objects for games. durrrr hahah 4am here atm so eh.
Mental ray has no specular. Just gloss and reflectivity which gloss is a part of. So you have to adjust the gloss and fiddle with the aniso bits to get a soft surface. That noise in the last animation is a example of low settings causing "texture" Due to reflective settings being way way too low. I normally set it to 60 and have issues with noise in dark shadowed areas.
{EDIT} Ok I think I know what you mean is how it is so strong or all over, Im doing it overblown to see the effect easier. I am setting up some cheapo maps IE using what I have in my resources and adapting them and pinching it down to a more uh, useable real scale effect.
normal map how you usually expect to see it:
normals 1.jpg
same normal map but with no parallax - this is what my normals trick in lightwave was doing (just using the greyscale spec map and some nodes instead):
normals 2.jpg
Comparing mine to yours it is just mine sucks balls. hahah too "un" random.
mine
yours cropped
Needs some adjustment on the aniso strength. Acually it would be better if I did a map to control how tight it is or loose. More variables? heh
isotropy basically means the same in all directions, anisotropy is the opposite - so in lightwave it's used for reflection blurs, anisotropic reflections means the U direction is blurred more or less than the V direction, resulting in the brushed metal or CD effect:
aniso.jpg
that's how I use it anyway, I don't really understand how you're using it in max, for all I know it could be different
if I give you a visual representation of what that normal map I posted earlier is doing then maybe it will be more clear (in reality it's more subtle than this):
normals model.jpg
think about how that is working on the incidence gradients for the colour, as far as they're concerned each tile is rotated differently, so each tile's colour will flip slightly earlier or later (that's what I mean when I say rotation, this could be where the confusion is with your aniso rotation)
incidence gradient:
flip 1.jpg
incidence gradient tweaked normals:
flip 2.jpg
so your way may be varying the specular brightness in a pleasing way, but when it comes to adding the colour tint it won't be flipping like mine
What the anisotropy direction map is doing, is more similar what the painter of TMP enterprise was doing: Adding gradients that simulate the hull being made of different sections of brushed metal and not that the hull panels are poorly lined up.
So Just adding a global normal map will just highlight the enterprises poor build quality but might look good combined with other things. I see what you're doing with the spec effect and if it works it works, but surely that's infact more of a hack than actually changing the direction of anisotropy effect as max does it?
Only other thought is to hack at say things like the car paint shaders. But they often have ugly surfacing outside of "gel coat" look.
Aniso in max seems different since it directly refers to the highlight being "stretched" (hah opposite of what I say pinched ) Least under standard MR :
And yeah I have no real training or book taught terms just seat of the pants pushing buttons. So generic terminology often is a puzzle to me etc. I try to do things based on how or what I know of real objects, how the light plays on them etc. So yeah if you have to dumb down the descriptions and crap do not worry. I hope that the thread will help others as well. Maybe learn more than just how to do TMP hulls. >_>
I should probably take a rudimentary course to learn the deeper bits of max. I can just guess I know about 15% of the app.
Wouldn't it be a better way to achieve the effect by making the material have anisotropic highlights and using a map to control the direction of those anisotropic highlights...? Which is the approach that the others are taking - isn't that much closer in theory to what the painter actually did to the real model?
pearl paint doesn't behave anisotropically, it's an incidence effect, so I don't think that's the right way to go
imagine this is a microscopic cross section of the way the pearl paints went on, this is what the normal map is trying to copy:
paint micro.jpg
(the effect is actually more within the paint, but the principle is the same)
All way to overdone and well obviously re-purposed textures.
I will sift about on the vomit that is google's results on normals to see if I can figure out how to do it within mental ray and maybe standard materials.
Anyhow if anyone has input on anyway to get better TMP hulls feel free to inject tuts or whatever in this thread. Idea is for it to be a resource in the end.
there could be more than one way to achieve it though, if you can't add a normal map to the specular maybe you could use a global normal map and then a modifier on the diffuse to make it smooth; or perhaps you can use material mixing with a matte white material for the base then a glass like layer added on top of that, fully transparent except for specular, if there was no refraction a normal map could be global here; or are there clear coat modifiers you can add and mask with a map?
there's usually tonnes of different ways to do the same things
Image 2, map control ONLY of reflection colour as above PLUS angle of incidence based control of anisotropic orientation - basically copying the entire reflection colour tree to the orientation slot. so essentially the direction of the highlight will change as the colour changes as the angle of incidence changes.
everything else is just a single value, no other maps are used in any other slots, not "spec" (more properly, reflection) or gloss or anything.
Not saying that exactly nailed the effect or anything but just wanted to illustrate it.
Al
Al
[Edit]
I guess I don't know about the material system in C4D to actually come up with something like you or IRML did. Just more stuff to learn when I get the time...
[/Edit]
Anyhow gonna take a break from this for a while and do some painting. Likely have at it again later this evening. I think I will take what I have tried and apply it to a final material and see how it looks. I still want to mimic what IRML did with the same grainy reflection and intensity of colour.