I am at a stump at the moment concerning vue's procedural material system. What i would like to do is use only vue's own materials but i am finding that they tend to look to CG and to low in details when close up. The details look to soft and simplistic to me. I have to import my own bitmap textures but i should not have to do this as i would like to think there is more then enough play with the materials and graph editor to get very good results from. Are there any geniuses : ) here that are good with procedural materials and the graph editor at all. To me it seems there is a lot of potential here without having to resort to importing texture maps. Also there seems to be a serious lack of tutorials concerning the graph editor as i have been all over the web grabbing every tutorial i can lay my hands on.

BTW i have access to Vue 5 Infinite at the moment.

BM

The only real advice I can give is to stick at it.  Look at how the existing materials are made and try modifying them to get new materials or to improve one so it had finer detail.

Hopefully after you've done that for awhile you'll reach a point where you start to see how to make new materials from scratch.

Attached Link: http://www.art-head-start.com/free-stuff.html#tutes

I agree with bruno...check out jc's tutes.

IMHO.......the best textures are a combination of the two, image mapped and procedural. Many times, either by themselves don't cut it. But when used together......ahhhh.

M

Making new materials from scratch is easy, i was just wondering why vue's own procedurals tend to look so horrid most of the time. I though some one might have had the reciepe on realistic materials.

I have those tutorials that you had linked to. To bad that others do not provide more in depth ideas on how to create more photo-real surfaces within vue only. I more or less mastered Genetica 2.5 but i thought why could one not do the same in Vue's material editor but i have looked into all of the materials that came with the software and honestly i tend to believe i can get more detail and realism out of Genetica. In fact some of my own work will be in 3D World Magazine for Feb 2007 on the CD.

The one problem with image mapped textures is repeats sense they are not procedural once they are exported outside of the software that was used to create them. So any vista-like scene would have to be very well layered to avoid that repetative pattern although this should not be necessary.

If you checked Jim' tutorials, then I don't know what else to say. What makes Vue's procedurals horrid in your eyes? Is it the stock materials you dislike? Or the ones you create yourself? If you have an example, it would be easier to see.

Ok...but if you take a texture from Genetica, you can only apply it as an image map in Vue, which is what you don't want to do if I read correctly. I agree with bruno...don't know quite what you mean here. An example would indeed help.

But I must disagree on one thing.....making textures from scratch in a texture maker may be easy....but making them from scratch in Vue is not. !!  

Also...and I'm curious....you say that you've imported bitmaps but that 'you shouldn't have to'. Why not? That's what that function is there for. One thing about Vue that sets it's material editor apart is the ability to use image maps at all levels and capacities. 

Yup...confused.

M

Perhaps you would be more satisfied with the new features in Vue 6 Infinite?

With displacement, SSS, better lighting, photon mapping, material layers and such, you have more control.

This thread got me wondering how deep one could go in the V6I material and function editors with texture maps and procedurals. I used image maps to drive the procedurals and procedurals to drive image distributions, bump, displacement etc...and vice verse.

Great Scott.....it gets real complicated real quick and with the addition of displacement and hypertextures and layers, you can go deep enough to implode.

I find Vue's material and function editor to be a texturemaker's dream....

However, Vue imploded first and crashed whenever I tried to use displacement with layers. I'm gonna mess some more with it tonite........

Your such a pioneer, Mr. M! 

I haven't seriously got to grips with material layers yet, but they sure look promising - especially for EcoSystems.

I trust you're reporting those bugs to e-on. Don't think too many people are using layers yet, so they may not be getting a lot of public feedback on those.

Can't wait for your full-powered V6i products to start appearing - i hope   :o) 

Control is not the problem. Just details really. For example i can open up Terragen and make a simple surface and i get many sub-pixel textures just from that one surface alone, not to boast about Terragen but it is just that i have used it longer then Vue. Yet i like using Vue because it suits more the artist rather then having to get technical about Terragen's use.

I am thinking that many of the procedurals just need a sub-noise, a graininess that adds a grime to the surfaces that takes away from the obvious cg smoothness of each texture. This is what i am thinking. Any surface made in Terragen 2 has sub-noise by default so there is never a smoothness to any given surface. Most of this grime detail is of course for more natural surfaces like ground, rocks, bark and the like.

I do want to get Vue 6. That displacement sounds promising and hyper-textures as well. These might be the details to surfacing i am looking for. I just will wait until this version is mostly clear of bugs.     :)

Here are examples of Terragen 2 and Vue 5 Infinite - Simple perlin noise only. In vue i added a fine noise and i was thinking about using something like this to detail overall procedural textures. I figured by adding a few more noises that this might imitate terragen's noise to a certain degree. Softening the hard shadows might help as well.

img134.imageshack.us/img134/1759/compairef0.jpg

Remember that in Vue, you have so much more control over the noise you want to create. In TG, it's fractal layer and fractal breackup, and eventually blended by another noise, but in Vue, you can combine many different fractal and noise patterns together, and decide which pattern you want to use ( voronoi, perlin...), how they will be combined ( by a function, by a bitmap), add filters so the noise only appears at ceratin slopes or altitude inside the function.
If you find the surface of a procedural too smooth, try reducing the size of the fractal noise, and add another noise for small details, like "granite", this noise works wonders at very small scales.

True, there is more control. I will admit that terragen is rather limited with it's own surface textures. Terragen 2 has perlins, voronoi and additional turbulent noise but these are all dedicated to terrains but what is nice about vue is a larger variety of noises. I think that diving into the nodal system that vue has is were the solution is and just not mearly the basic material editor.  

In fact as i was discovering the "granite" is very good for tiny noise.    :)

Thank you for the suggestions.   :)