Arroway Materials

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maeglin1
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Arroway Materials

Post by maeglin1 » Thu Feb 13, 2014 5:59 am

I just downloaded a Wood Texture Pack from Arroway. Each texture comes with 3 PNG's: Diffuse, Bump & Reflectivity. I tried importing them into Sketchup and it crashed. I then realized I had to import the DIFFUSE PNG's only.

Okay, that's done. How the hell do I use the other two texture maps? I cannot figure out how to do it in Indigo.
Am I doing something wrong?
Is the Diffuse PNG alone in Sketchup good enough for renders?

Next question: I download textures from the Indigo Materials Page. I save them. I double click them and they load. But how do I find them again (in some sort of library) when I want to use them again? I want to create a library of Indigo (PIGM) files but don't know how.

Thanks.

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Oscar J
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by Oscar J » Thu Feb 13, 2014 6:55 am

I am no Skindigo user but I imagine it's roughly the same method in all exporters.

The bump texture goes into the bump map channel, and the spec map goes into the exponent map slot.

But I once learned from Headroom that it's better to make two separate materials with the same diffuse and bump texture, and then make a blend material out of them, with the spec map as blend map.

Hope that helps.

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zeitmeister
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by zeitmeister » Thu Feb 13, 2014 7:12 am

Oscar J wrote: But I once learned from Headroom that it's better to make two separate materials with the same diffuse and bump texture, and then make a blend material out of them, with the spec map as blend map.

Hope that helps.
Wow... gonna try it!
Cheers, David



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Zom-B
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by Zom-B » Thu Feb 13, 2014 7:33 am

zeitmeister wrote:
Oscar J wrote: But I once learned from Headroom that it's better to make two separate materials with the same diffuse and bump texture, and then make a blend material out of them, with the spec map as blend map.

Hope that helps.
Wow... gonna try it!
This technique is not as fancy anymore as it was back in the days, now "Fresnel Scale" is the parameter to map non reflective parts ;)
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maeglin1
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by maeglin1 » Thu Feb 13, 2014 8:22 am

Yes... all that's fine and dandy.... does anyone know the answer to the questions though...?

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zeitmeister
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by zeitmeister » Thu Feb 13, 2014 8:40 am

The pigm file Format is simply zip. Just go to your Indigo folder; app data - roaming; rename the pigm to zip et voila.
Cheers, David



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maeglin1
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by maeglin1 » Thu Feb 13, 2014 8:54 am

Great. That's one box ticked. Thanks for the help.
I just now need to figure out the Skindigo Material Editor and where to place what where.

Bump, Reflectivity and Diffuse. I will get there in the end.

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galinette
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by galinette » Thu Feb 13, 2014 10:02 am

I used the reflectivity/shininess map as an exponent map, with a "gamma" of 4, a "B" value of 5000, a "C" value of 10

This way:
- Texture value of 0 => exponent 10
- Texture value of 64 => exponent 30
- Texture value of 128 => exponent 327
- Texture value of 192 => exponent 1626
- Texture value of 255 => exponent 5010

You can tweak gamma, B and C, but using high gammas of 4 or above is quite effective into getting a wide range of exponents over all the 0..255 texture value range.

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Pibuz
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by Pibuz » Thu Feb 13, 2014 10:51 am

Zom-B wrote: This technique is not as fancy anymore as it was back in the days, now "Fresnel Scale" is the parameter to map non reflective parts ;)
How it is done is the question now... :roll:

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bubs
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by bubs » Thu Feb 13, 2014 11:05 am

maeglin1 wrote:Great. That's one box ticked. Thanks for the help.
I just now need to figure out the Skindigo Material Editor and where to place what where.

Bump, Reflectivity and Diffuse. I will get there in the end.
I'm not sure if your questions really are as simple as - how do you actually attach the textures in skindigo? If that's your problem then... In each of the slots (eg bump) use the drop down menu to choose 'texture' then click the little box with the dots (...) next to it. You get a new dialogue box, choose 'new' and find the associated map. Click accept and the map is loaded. After that just alter the values to suit your needs...

Apologies if I'm over simplifying, wasn't sure exactly what your issue was...

Good luck anyway!

Ps - in case you didn't realise - diffuse goes in the albedo slot, bump in bump, and spec / ref in exp slot, though with arroway spec maps you will probably have to try doing something like gallinette suggested to get it to look correct as they are more geared towards other render programs and don't have enough contrast to work well unaltered in indigo IMHO.

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Zom-B
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by Zom-B » Thu Feb 13, 2014 12:53 pm

Pibuz wrote:How it is done is the question now... :roll:
Is a parameter for Phong since quite some time already, been introduced with double sided mat etc.
Its included in the C4D exporter since then:
frsnel_scale.jpg
As you can see, it is super powerful to control the amount of reflection using a map, I use it on most of my materials!
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fenerolina
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by fenerolina » Thu Feb 13, 2014 2:10 pm

Hi,
This is the way I use to work with wood textures: An easy example would be a pine plank texture and a natural/waxed finish looking.
-First I place the diffuse map in sketchup. Verify scale of the model and scale of the wood (how long your board should be in relation of the texture). Then set the camera very close to the plank at a grazing angle with an indirect light source infront.
-Then in skindigo I set the material type to phong, ior 1,2 and exponent to 400 or so. Place the bump map in the bump channel at a 0.0004m value. finally set the albedo map to none with 20 black color and render to test. With pine the dark vains and knots are harder so shoud be the lighter parts in bump texture. I use to edit bump and exponent map in gimp/levels.
-Set the bump to none when I'm happy and work with the exponent map. With pine softer parts doesn't shine so much so should be the darkest parts of the texture. And yes Zom_b that texture works definitely better if you set it on the fresnel scale, didn't know that. So what to do with the exponent channel?. When it's ok, I check the final result with all textures on, and generaly desaturate a lot.
These are some renders of the example:
Attachments
Bump_only.png
Specular_only.png
all_maps_on.png

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Zom-B
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by Zom-B » Thu Feb 13, 2014 2:26 pm

fenerolina wrote:So what to do with the exponent channel?
The exponent channel is still a important one to map.

With mappin the fresnel scale, you adjust the reflectance amount with a exponent map the blurriness!

So in your case the exponent map still should be used to lower the sharpness of the reflections in the "dimmed" areas of the texture.
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fenerolina
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by fenerolina » Thu Feb 13, 2014 3:01 pm

Will make some tests! Thank you!

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maeglin1
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Re: Arroway Materials

Post by maeglin1 » Thu Feb 13, 2014 5:43 pm

fenerolina wrote:Will make some tests! Thank you!
Many thanks for all the replies. I appreciate the help. Very confusing though.

THERE ARE ALOT OF VIDEOS ON THE NET AND WEBSITES SUPPORTING VRAY BUT INDIGO HAS NO SUPPORT AT ALL EXCEPT THE FEW VIDEOS THEY RELEASED. It would be good if someone like (ZOM B) and other worthy accolades did some videos for YouTube. I have spent the last two weeks learning about CG and all the info has come from people who use Vray, Photoshop and 3Ds Max.

Applying materials should be easier and less confusing. To quote Einstein: " Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler".

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