Ian, Matt, other overlords of IE-dome,

Do you have any insight into what the project should incorporate or leave out that we haven’t tried to address?

And what will the next step be?

thanks,
Yon

For these previews I really don’t think secondary rays are a good idea (in order to use GI properly with RT Transparency).

Bumps look massively different when using GI, so I would recommend using it in the previews for non transparent objects as most of us use GI in our final renders these days.

I also don’t think master materials should be within a mile of this project They have no scale which will make setting-up a blind process.

I agree with everything else

My 2p
Ian

Hi Yon,
I am more of a Bauhaus fan myself, so asymmetry doesn’t bother me at all as long as there is some balance.

I actually prefer the dynamic, more extreme perspective. I was just trying an option that maximized the material object in the view. Feel free to experiment with the view to maximize the material object, and still have a dynamic perspective.

I think your comments are right on. I will try some more experiments and see where I end up.
Gianluca hasn’t weighed in on this latest version so I want to get his feedack too.
One thing I don’t want is for the grid design to compete with the material object, so I am trying to keep it fairly simple, and “uncluttered”. I think the Evermotion sample shows a grid that has just a little too much going on.

As far as GI in the preview, I think the GI effect looks great on solid surfaces. If rendering glass, you could set the object up in a selection set and have it completely excluded from the GI calculation, or just turn GI off.

Gianluca and I discussed this a bit, and his idea is to try and keep things fairly straightforward. He did have GI turned on in his sample project, but he did not have the lights tinted with colors (I set that up) and said he would prefer not to have the colored lights (beginning to be too complex of a light setup).
For simple materials (white stucco, etc.) the lighting is what gives life to the material. I know this is not a material ball rendering contest, but we should do what we can to have a nicely illuminated scene without going overboard. As this project is released to the general EIAS public, I think there will be a lot of variations, and people are naturally going to modify things, especially if it makes their material preview look better.

I actually have different “glass” materials that I use that are optimized for speed and quality, some pull out all the stops and take forever to render, others look “just good enough” while rendering pretty fast. As a contributer I would probably render the ball with whatever settings i would normally use for each material, even if it was just a simple Phong.

Utimately, this is going to be up to the individual contributor to decide when they create a material. There will need to be a description of the material and how it is meant to be used, and any optimizations/ tricks can be mentioned there.
For some materials (like gemstones) a user may spend some serious time playing with the photon settings of the lights, and adjust the light positions to show the effect of caustics in the preview. This is fine, but we probably don’t need to worry about trying to “standardize” the basic setup to accommodate this.

Thanks for the input. I’ll post again when I have made some progress.
Dave

Ian,
Thanks for the feedback.  And I have a question about material scalability.  How would applying a material to an object directly, vs through a master material, allow you to scale it?  Or what was the difference.

I had assumed a premade material behaves the same, master or no.

Thanks,
Yon

Dave,

Ideally the master project would only have one set up, and one place to add the new material.  If people change the lights, camera, or any settings, the preview is of diminished value.  After all, how would you know if the preview looks cool because of the material, or one of a million other variables. 

To show case the material, the submitter would supplement the preview with an additional rendering of his or her choice.  There they could show their own technical prowess.

Yon

Good point Yon!

Black Box - 10 April 2007 12:13 PM

Ian,
Thanks for the feedback.  And I have a question about material scalability.  How would applying a material to an object directly, vs through a master material, allow you to scale it?  Or what was the difference.

I had assumed a premade material behaves the same, master or no.

Thanks,
Yon

It’s the same until you start playing with it personally, if I loaded a material onto the preview model and it was HUGE, I would want to scale it down to a size where it looked good....

You can’t do that with a master because there is no preview of your model in the texture info window.

Ian

Ian,
Ah, now I see what you were saying.  And this gets us back to the small-medium-large issue.  I would think for the preview that nothing gets changed at all.  And what you point out is absolutely and issue, as a texture may be too big or small to even be seen in a set scale.

Of course if you have 10 shaders making one material, re-scaling them may not produce the same effect.  Maybe we do need to have three projects to account for scale.  Maybe you have a suggestion?

Or we finally get a material-scale slider, which effects everything attached to it

Thanks again,
Yon

Haha

Yes that slider would be nice wouldn’t it!

I’ll go along with whatever you think is best, though I think if we keep it as one project all will be easier.

Ian

new examples with prominent material

Those look great Gianluca!
Nice variation on the grid.

New variation on grid design.
This is based on a direction Gianluca is taking with the grid.

I wanted to try getting all of the color and grayscale elements into a radial pattern.
This allows the camera to zoom in much tighter on the material ball.

I think there is too much white space in the “color chip” area.

Other than that, what does everybody think?

Any other suggestions for improvement?

Just a tweak…
Input is welcome!

New images and new shapes with new Dave’s grid.
I add a little sphere into for SSS and trasparency Test.

Other examples.