I have almost never managed to create the material that i want in Vue. Most of my procedural materials are made in Animation:Master or in DarkTree. I tought that I should do some nice materials for Vue but as almost allways I find it hard to create what I want. What I seem to miss most is better 'combiner' functions. I you as an example has a combiner such as bricks most app let's you adjust the width between the stones and such. Yesterday I wanted to create a procedural material for an lemon. Thats something that would take me about 15 minutes in Animation:Master. I spent 5 hours on it in Vue but I never got it right. I currently can't say that I have enough knowledge about Vues procedural editor (and how could I with that lack of documentation ;) ) to blame it on Vue. I did not even get past the first step witch was to create the small round craters in the lemon surface. The closes I got was the ready made 'Starfield' or by creating my own that used the dots function. What I want is a lot more dots than there is in the starfield, I want them more even in size and they may not overlapp each other. In Animation:Master or DarkTree I would had used a 'cell' combiner for this that would had let me adjust the amount of dots as well as the spacing of them. Can anyone help me with this?

Easiest way to make that type material is to start with bmp pictures I'd say. It would be easy. particulary the dimples. Make a picture up and import it in the bump section of the material. From there you'll be able to adjust it's scale easily. I find that the material editor in Vue is really easy to use and I have no problem usually getting the material I need for a project. Making pure proceederal types can be tricky though so best sometimes to mix and match.

Creating procedurals is a question of try, try, try.

A sample for the lemon (this one were created from 2 spheres and 1 terrain):

For the bumps, select NOISE(smooth)
For the filter select ROUND CLIP 95% cubic and its gain to 0.150
Then right-click in the bumps window and select EDIT FUNCTION. There, reduce the scale X,Y and Z to 0.30.

Hope this helps.
Guitta

I will shure give it a second chance. I do however not like the idea to 'cheat' using image maps. In an application that not has procedural materials that's OK as well as for things that simply can't be done. Otherwise I could just as well create everything as image maps instead. The lemon you did Guitta is not bad and I suppose you throw it together for me. But it does need some more work to get really god ;) The dimbles in a lemon is very round, only goes inwards and are pretty evenly spaced. So what I need to create is a function that renders dark round spots on a about 50% grey surface and combine this with another that creates the main surface structure without the main structure effecting the inner part of the dimple. If I'm not wrong. In order to create such dimples using the Noise(Smooth) function the filter would really have to look like a 'U' . But as far as I can remeber thats not possible in Vues filter (can't test from where I am). If it was the color component I could have mapped black to black, grey to grey and white to black to get a grey and black only result. So how do I get such a result from the bump component? I will of course try and try and maybe even try again but if it's not even possibly then it's not a try, it's wast of time ;).

"I do however not like the idea to 'cheat' using image maps." That's funny, I like that. Should almost be quote of the day.

In fact, I have put the lemon together for you, yes:-) and very fast. You can create your own bump and function files in 512x512 grey scale. MAke it semless and you can get every thing you want. In playing around with existing filters or in creating bew filters (click on a filter and choose EDIT), there are infinite possibilities. But you're right, it needs time. To create "dark round spots" combined with a bump is also possible. The dark round spots are done with a color mixture function. If I knew exactly what you're looking for, I could try out. Needs a sample image... Guitta

Before I start....I am a NOVICE at this at best. IF you want realism, and don't want to burn the time getting generated in view, then take a picture of a lemon with a digital. Do it at a high resolution, and then pu,ll it in to Vue as a material. You'll get realism wiht ease there. I personally feel that making a material is an artform in itself. I think that the artist's perspective can REALLY be seen in "homemade" materials that are found in an image. Yes, it can be time consuming as hell...but the material is unique to your own "mind's eye" and a part of you (essentially). If you are on a timetable (like the image is for work), then you are definitely right to want to have time efficiency. Have you tried exporting your Animation:Master or DarkTree stuff as a BMP or JPG?? YOu could then pull them into Vue with no problem...thereby killing the time issue. Just some thoughts from a novice. Thanks!! Akenaton

Hmmm... Dont missunderstand me MightyPete ;)

I don't consider imagemaps in procedural or in some ways at all a cheat or bad thing when it comes to creating an image. And it's even more true for commercial work.

But..
If I have to manually produce imagemaps then why should I use the procedural material at all? It would probably be faster to generate the color, bump, specularity maps in DarkTree and simply apply them than to do half of them as images and half as procedurals. It would from a user point of view probably also be better to supply the models as .obj files together with the bitmaps than in .vob format that only can be used in Vue. As I'm planning to do some fruit and vegetebles models for Vue I need to know what the limits of the procedurals are so I can do the right decisions.

In general I think procedurals are fun and poweful and resusable and I like to work with them so...

In order to fresh up my memory on how to do procedurals I started up Animation Master and did this lemon procedural in about 30 minutes. This is the minimum quality I'm aiming at in Vue to so the question is.

Can I do it, is it time effective or do I have to create the texture outside of Vue.

Well gebe.. I'll look into what possibilitys the 'function image' has to offer. and aken_aton... You might be a bigginer but your surely not stupid ;) All your tips are very true. But as my end goal not is an image but models compleate with materials I cant at least fake it with photos ;)

Good point! And I see by your lemon (which I'm sure would have taken me 4-5 hours on a good day) that you are a master at 3d. I only hope that by hanging around you and Gebe and the others in here, that your expertise will rub off on me 8 ) This stuff is too groovy.

Sorry about that potato shaped lemon;) I have now managed to get some parts to work but the dimples remains the main problem. The base look pretty OK with more bumps and more green at the ends. The sides are a bit to smooth but if I cen get the dimples to look as I want them there would also be some structure between the dimples. Otherwise I have to adjust the bump for that part in one of the other bump functions. So.. Any ideas for the dimples (except for images as I will try that later anyway of simple curiosity); ? I did not manage to get the material to 'stick' to my own imported lemon model. Strangely the top and bottom green and bump works but the dimples almost dissapers with only a couple showing up an the model. I have checked that all parts of the material uses object standard mapping. Is that the wrong mapping to use or what else could it be? In the load function dialog all my saved functions has totally black previews. This also happens if a load them into a store slot. Any reason for this?

To clarify. The lemon in the rendeder is not the imported one. It looked to ugly to even show;

I'm sorry, but without having the file I cannot say what to do with this one. I'm in the same situation as you:-). I want to say I would need to try and to try and to try again until I get what I want. Be sure, nearly every thing is possible in Vue:-) Guitta

Now I have done some test with image maps. The closest uses color,bump and specularity maps generated by DarkTree.

A little more tweeking and that one would be OK. The problem with this approach is that all oranges get identical unless I do different image sets.

In order to get round dimples at the poles the dimples has to be streatched in the image. In this case DarkTree takes care of that with means that a software costing more than Vue is needed in order to create the maps. ;(

The other lemon is Vue procedurals except for the distribution and dimple bump function witch is the specular Darktre map.

(I tried to manually create the distibution map in photoshop but with no luck. The deformations at the poles made it impossible.)

I also found i very hard to combine a layer with an image with another layes becase I could not control how much influence the image should have in the funtion. The only control I had was the Gain witch means that I would have to create two Materials in stead as two layers and then combine them to a new material and use Gain for control.
I felt that was a bit to much ;)

Well..
I have now used the whole weekend for this round hole project and I give up.

I really think that Vue could need some more functionality in the function department. There are some functions that have 'combiner' effects but one have to little control over them.

Take as an example the Drought function. Here I really miss a control over the space between the stones and how round the stones are. In the Dots I want better controll of size, size variation, amount and distance between them.

Something to hope for in Vue5 ?
Guitta If you ever succed in this matter of round dimples then pleace make a post. I don't fell that I can spend any more time on this that took 30 minutes in AM and maybe two hours in DarkTree (first time I used it). I really think Vue should reconsider the way procedurals are created. Procedurals are never easy to learn but even if the interface in Vue is fancy the 'brick' building way that AM and DarkTree uses is much more easy to understand and to get a grip on than looking att the x,y,z waveform views.