Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

General questions about Indigo, the scene format, rendering etc...
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butaixianran
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Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by butaixianran » Mon Nov 12, 2018 9:01 pm

I like indigo, it has the best render result in the world. The problem is people don't use it anymore.

The reason for stopping inidigo from popular is we have to learn its mat system, those names and types are new to us.

But people don't want to learn a new mat system, they just want a mat system they familiar with to have a PBR render result.

Look at corona renderer, its mat system is so simple, we don't need to learn anything new.

That's why corona is so popular even it is cpu only. Now, even all chinese render farms support corona.


Everybody is talking about how corona is easy to use, even its render result is not as good as indigo.

I keeps telling them indigo's mat system is not that hard, you can learn it in a hour. But they just don't want to.

They have choices like corona to allow them from learning anything new.

I feel like if indigo don't do something to make its mat system much easier, we may lose it.

And corona will be the most popular PBR renderer in the market.

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OnoSendai
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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by OnoSendai » Wed Nov 21, 2018 12:34 am

Hi butaixianran, thanks for the post.

Some time after Indigo was released, there became a kind of de-facto standard of PBR materials. Since Indigo predated this standard we couldn't really implement it at the time.

However we have already started adopting some parts of this PBR 'standard', for example we replaced 'exponent' with 'roughness' in various places.

Another thing we will probably do in the future is to add a 'metallicity' parameter to the Phong material. Currently a Phong material can either be metal or not. If you want to make a partially metal material you need to blend between two Phong materials. Having a metallicity parameter would simplify this.

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pixie
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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by pixie » Wed Nov 21, 2018 1:23 am

For me the biggest problem isn't the indigo materials, but how cumbersome it is to mix multiple materials so one can exploite the vast superiority of Indigo materials. AFA simple materials go they couldn't be any simpler.

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Oscar J
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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by Oscar J » Wed Nov 21, 2018 7:54 am

Would just like to mention that there's usually not one quick fix to popularise a software. The material system isn't *the* key thing holding Indigo back, although there's definitely disadvantages, from a usability point of view, with having separate material models rather than an "über-material" à la V-RayMtl (which I guess is what OP is suggesting?).

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thesquirell
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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by thesquirell » Wed Nov 21, 2018 11:14 pm

Can totally understand OP! But, I do have to say something about this material system, as well.

Not wanting to sound like an idiot, or a nerd, it actually taught me something about physical aspects of the materials that surrounds us. I actually wanted to learn about n,k, lab data, spectrums, absorptions...it kinda played a big role in understanding the optical nature of things around us. After that, other material systems looked kinda dull, and more complex, actually.

May I even suggest that devs publish the "lite" version, with simplified, out of the box solutions for broad commercial use, and something like "expanded", with even more complicated options then the ones we have at this moment! :D

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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by Tyler » Wed Nov 21, 2018 11:35 pm

maybe one of the reason people don't use indigo is because of its community. People here never answer to anything, don't give tips or so, about 3 days ago i've just post a question about saving files to exr, that is not a very complicated question but still, nobody told me how to do that. i was even wondering if you need to buy indigo to have an answer or so but i'm so over buying rendering engines, this time i wanna be sure of what is possible or not before put some money on another crap.

when you try something or work on a project, 3 day is eternity to get answered, so if indigo is just a toy fine but when you need a productivity tool you need a very detailed manual or a good community or a lot of tutorial, whit indigo you got nothing out of those 3.

anyway, check the other engines forums and see the people reactivity there, in octane they even got a Skype group, people tell you right away how to do something when you got an issue and i can assure you those people work hard in studios.

and one last thing if you want indigo to get popular maybe another thing is to have a maya plugin which i don't understand why is not available.

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pixie
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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by pixie » Thu Nov 22, 2018 5:32 am

Dear God Tyler... do I own you anything and I forgot? Can you picture that somehow not as many use EXR or had the problems you have went through? Let's say for a moment that I I (a) never use EXR (b) in my setup EXR problems doesn't arise. Have you at least made a thorough picture of the problems you went through? For ccrying out loud, you write a few couple of words...

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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by pixie » Thu Nov 22, 2018 5:41 am

Had you been as thorough in explaining your problem as you were in this dissertation of yours regarding the "problems" you find in the community, and perhaps people would be actually more helpful.

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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by Tyler » Thu Nov 22, 2018 8:32 am

ok this is just my point of view, don't take it so personally.

this post was about how to make indigo more popular and i was just pointing out what could be the reasons why.

anyway, you or other users neither own me nothing, i understand i'm facing issues not everybody have, it is just on other engines forums people help new users as they are happy new people use the engine.

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pixie
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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by pixie » Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:22 am

Well, sorry if I sounded harsh, but as someone who hangs around here for quite some time I can assure you that you have a helpful community around here, but sadly we are perhaps not as much as we would like to be. :(

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Zom-B
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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by Zom-B » Sun Nov 25, 2018 4:12 am

after answering the same beginner questions over and over again because people nowadays tend rather to ask then try or search for a answer I lost my motivation to do so further...
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Re: Need a new mat structure to make indigo popular

Post by Legos2112 » Thu Dec 13, 2018 11:39 am

Hi, I've been using indigo since 2010 and it's my favorite software.

I love the warmth of light and I think that's what sets it apart from everyone else.

but I must admit that even though I have been using the program for 8 years, my renders are not as good as they should be,
There are many things that I do not know about materials, lighting, camera,etc etc. Im an architect therefore my interest is shown in the design. I do not consider myself a render artist although I like to improve constantly, I have been discovering new things about how to render faster and better, how to improve the lighting and all the necessary things to make a more realistic render.

but it's something I discovered with trial and error, for example yesterday indigo took 14 hours to make a scene and today I checked the model change some things of the materials set the lights in layer adjust the sun, the rendering system, played a bit with the camera and I managed to make a better scene in only 4 hours of the same model.

last week to use a farm in the city I was in the obligation to use vray, I do not use it, I never liked the interface and even less that the image has a quality limit.

i didnt not know anything about it, but a couple of hours on YouTube and I managed make a decent render, set the render management network from my computer and bunch of other stuff.

anyway I was not happy with the result because i dont like the quality of the ligth and the render need a lot of time in photoshop. but what I mean is that there are a lot of tutorials and info about how to do what you need, the community is very big. and information is obtained with respect to any situation; in the forum of indigo there is a lot of information and experience of all the users but it is not easily obtained you have to spend a lot of time looking an example similar to your case. so I think that to increase the popularity of indigo the best users of indigo should upload some tutorials, how they do their scenes as they handle materials lights how to take advantage of all the advantages of indigo but in a practical visual way using different platforms.

example: you could upload tutorials of how to do the scenes for the competitions, those are great!!

then one as a user would feel more supported and confident to use indigo. Sometimes I want to impose indigo on my colleagues to achieve a delivery etc etc. but if I am not there to clarify a doubt they discard it at once. since the tutorials on YouTube are very limited.

then summarizing
-Upload tutorials to youtube from different pro indigo users.
-create a section of tips and advice on the website (but more pleasantly detached from the forum)
-encourage use in social networks as an Instagram
maybe take a 3dwarehouse model an show how to set in sketchup, materials, ligth layer, hd sky, etc..

im also a revit user but when it come to render i export the model to sketchup set the materials ans the scene and set to indigo that way, because i dont like how the render look straight from revit
Arq. Diego Moreno
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