Im trying to make a car paint material and am looking in the manual to learn the nodes but nowhere does it say where I should plug them into?

I know some of them but others just havent got a clue?  The basics like adding texture maps, bump, displace, reflect , transparency maps, spec are not a problem but I have notice that some cant be pluged into the same place.  I want to check out the Raytrace nodes but most of them cant see a logical place to plug them into?

Is there any tutorials and books on this area?

Search for templargfx; in the Free Stuff area, and then here in the Poser Forum.

If you pop over to RuntimeDNA they have a couple of poser related forums, including one devoted just to the Poser Nodes, look for the names semidieu, Olivier & bagginsbill & you won't go far wrong.

Thanks il check this out.

I forgot to mention an important name from over there, JohnRickardJR with his site CastlePoser has an almost full tutorial list of the Poser Material Room Nodes, well worth checking out while you're looking.

Clicking those little question marks that are in many channels of the PoserSurface node can also help :)

Yeah but who ever notices them? I didn't till you mentioned them :b_tonguewink:

Diffuse, Alternate Diffuse, Alternate Specular, and reflection are really all just diffuse nodes. you can plug anything into any one of them to get the exact same effect.

Im 90% sure refraction is also just another diffuse node, but I havent tried it in a long time so I am not 100% sure.

refraction, reflection, and fresnel will work perfectly fine if plugged into either Diffuse, Alternate Diffuse, Reflection, Alternate Specular or refraction. of course certain conditions must be met for these to work.

obviously you need raytrace turned on in your properties. but refraction needs transperancy turned on the objects to work correctly, reflection needs something to reflect, and fresnel needs both.

I have found you can't plug any of the light nodes into a light, not sure why I would need to do that but it's frustrating not being able to.

Quote - I have found you can't plug any of the light nodes into a light, not sure why I would need to do that but it's frustrating not being able to.

The light nodes plug into the PoserSerface route node not a light route node.  The lighting nodes go to their respective places, like Raytrace/Recfect to the Reflection colour of the route node, Specular/Blinn to the Alternate Spectular of the route node.

Im trying to make a good car paint material but its prooving to be very hard. 

Attached Link: My Free Stuff

You can save yourself alot of time and effort, and download my pack of car materials from the freebie section.

There are 158 Materials in total in this package for Poser 5,6,7

Ranging from ClearCoat, Sparkle Paint, SuperGloss, and ColorChange (Chameleon/flipflop)
also, there are interior materials like carpet, leather and plastic, chrome metals, tyre rubber and the like.

When in doubt, try it out. I mean, experimentation may be scary but it's a good way to see what things work and what things don't.

Quote - Click the above image for a full size preview (these are unedited materials from this free pack on the car. no other materials were used!)

You can save yourself alot of time and effort, and download my pack of car materials from the freebie section.

There are 158 Materials in total in this package for Poser 5,6,7

Ranging from ClearCoat, Sparkle Paint, SuperGloss, and ColorChange (Chameleon/flipflop)
also, there are interior materials like carpet, leather and plastic, chrome metals, tyre rubber and the like.

Thankyou so much.  Im just checking them all out now, looks like you have done a realy good job on these.

I can see from the setup I wasnt far off when making my own, but a little off is enougth to make it look totaly wrong.  Im using the 3ds max demo and trying to make the car shader for poser in these pictures.  Im not sure than poser can achive such renders though.

First picture was a shader I made in max.  Second shader is max 9 built in shader.

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/8669/conceptcarfinallarge2800xt.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/7605/paint29mb.jpg

Couldnt get any image shack link to show phumb nail or pictures in thred?

Quote - The light nodes plug into the PoserSerface route node not a light route node.  The lighting nodes go to their respective places, like Raytrace/Recfect to the Reflection colour of the route node, Specular/Blinn to the Alternate Spectular of the route node.

I know but I'm one of these people who's never happy with something being unusable :D you can actually plug those node into any of the sockets, they don't just have to plug into the sockets they're named for. :D

Quote - > Quote - The light nodes plug into the PoserSerface route node not a light route node.  The lighting nodes go to their respective places, like Raytrace/Recfect to the Reflection colour of the route node, Specular/Blinn to the Alternate Spectular of the route node.

I know but I'm one of these people who's never happy with something being unusable :D you can actually plug those node into any of the sockets, they don't just have to plug into the sockets they're named for. :D

Yep I know you cam plug em in anywhere which can offer some good but odd results.  I just wondered why you where trying to plug em into a light route node, you must know your way about the nodes fine im sure, maybe I was mistaken or miss read your post.

I think one of my short falls at the moment is a good light setup.

I know enough to not get what I want very often :D I just wonder what effect the light nodes would have on the light in a scene by being plugged into the actual light instead of being plugged into objects, I have these strange ideas sometimes.

I just tried to trick poser into plugging the diffuse node into a light by plugging it into a simple color node on the background, then copying & pasting it into the light, what I got was the simple color node with it's output plugged into it's own input, Poser crashed to the desktop when I clicked the node but it's cured my curiosity as to what will happen. :D Poser can't do it hehehe

IBL lighting is the way to go, I never use the old setups now, Olivier over at RDNA has a lot of tips for using it, really good tips. If you can find his tutorial on how to make the maps for it (can't find the link right now) it'll show you exactly where to put everything to get any light you want.

 A couple links for you on the subject.

Car Paint

Fresnel Effect

Thanks bagginsbill.  The first one was a script and athough followed what to do, it never worked.  Same for the seccond link.  I followed it and put the nodes in the right places and all the settings the same and it didnt look the same.  All I can think of is somhow the lighting is wrong despite me using HDR, IBL?

HDR won't make a bit of difference. The most important aspect of these materials is in the reflections which has nothing at all to do with diffuse lighting. Poser IBL is important for getting the diffuse lighting to be believable. For these types of materials, you need to get the reflections believable.

In the Fresnel tute I talked about the importance of the environment that is being reflected. If you don't use a sky dome or sphere along with some other objects to interrupt the visibility of the sky, the reflections will produce nothing interesting. When you look at car paint, glass, chrome, etc. it is all in the reflections of the environment and in the specular reflections of the light sources themselves. IBL does not produce any specular reflections at all.

Il go back and try again.   I made the sky ball  and stood a character over the car bonnet.  for some reason the car looks flat with no specular but will show the reflection still.    I added another light with IBL to try and create more specula but that didnt help.

Another huge problem im having is the render times.  Im puting the settings on at a level where its just alowing raytracing but its taking a very long time to test things out.  When I go for a final render it can take upto a hour or more.

bagginsbill do you think its posible to get a paint to look as good these renders?

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/8669/conceptcarfinallarge2800xt.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/7605/paint29mb.jpg

I took the basic Fresnel shader from my tutorial and modified a couple parameters to "overdo" the reflection a bit.  In particular, I changed the Edge_Blend Inner_Color to RGB(32, 32, 32) and the Attenuation to .8. The more realistic values are 0 for Inner_Color and .7 for Attenuation. I reduced the amount of subtraction of the Edge_Blend from 1 to .6 where it feeds into the Diffuse_Value, because the overdone Fresnel reflection was subtracting too much from the Diffuse_Value to match the render you showed me. I also added a noise node to the Diffuse_Value to get that speckled metallic flake look.

I don't have a beautifully curvy car like that to work with, so I used a vase instead. This is rendered in Poser 6.

I changed my ground to be plain white as in your render, and I reprogrammed my sky dome so that only the top of it is white - the rest is black. The extreme contrast of the white-black-white environment is what gives this render most of its flavor. There is a strong infinite light shining almost straight down, and a very week generic IBL for fill lighting. The details of the IBL really don't matter at all and using an HDR image in Poser for this is a total waste of time.

I'll post a screen shot of the shader next.

Oh one other thing - when doing test renders you can skip a lot of detail in exchange for speed. Set your Min Shading Rate to 5 - this will greatly speed up the render. Don't forget to put it back to a low number, 1 or less, for final render. I usually use values from .2 to .5 for final work, depending on how busy the textures are.

Thanks for this info its realy helpfull.   I was unsure that poser could do such good renders and shaders, this shows in the right hands its posible.

Im going to make this material now.

(Edit) Forgot to mention I no longer consider this to be accurate. I did not completely understand the correct way to do the Fresnel at the time. That is why I wrote the Fresnel article - because I wasn't getting the right effect and when I found out why I figured people should know.

This is the "Super Red" shader by templargfx. (No offense intended templar - you do great work). I think its nice but suffers for lack of the proper Fresnel effect. Templar's Edge_Blend is too flat using RGB(103,103,103) for the Inner_Color (way too high) and Attenuation of .1 (way too low). Also, the Diffuse_Value is not using the Edge_Blend like it should, so the red doesn't fall off properly.

Wow these are looking dam good.  Could you show me a pic of the sky dome please, im just trying to set up one now and lighting.  The shader is made now I just need to get the rest into place.

However, I think the Blinn specular is ruining it. The whole thing is getting a purple tone to it, even though the diffuse color is pure red.

He used a Spots node for the speckles and I left that in - I think it's better than the noise node I was using. I also left the Blinn+Spots he used for the specular. I also turned off the Reflection_Lite_Mult switch - that should never be on. It dims the reflections in a way that has nothing to do with reality.

I think this looks very nice. The Blinn gives it an interesting quality that simulates the metallic flakes well. So I take back what I said. The Blinn wasn't the problem - it was the Fresnel effect that was missing.

I'll post the shader for the sky sphere next.

The key value is the 700 in the subtract node. Adjust that lower to make a larger white area, higher for a smaller white area.

Make sure you turn of Cast Shadows for the sky sphere!!!!

Ahh right.  I just made a dome in hexagon and set the top area to a shading domain coloured white.  I added basic IBL and added the infinate light but then the infinate light dont alow the white spot in the  dome to show as the light is pointing down?

Yes the dome would block the infinite light. You have to turn off shadow casting for a sky dome. Also, you don't want the sky dome to be "lit" - you want it to give off its own color regardless of the lighting. That's why I plugged into the ambient channel.

You'll have to show me what you changed on my paints, and I will have a play around and see what I think of the end result, might update my free pack!

The above image was the test scene I used when creating the materials, a little on the complex side, but it helped having a full on car to get the looks right.

I could never get decent looking tyres, got me extremely angry many MANY times trying to make decent rubber LOL

tez,

You made a mistake. You have the subtract node plugged into the Clamp node through Value_2. It is supposed to be connect through Value_1. Value_2 doesn't do anything at all on a Clamp node.

templargfx,
I'll post you the edit tomorrow - it's a simple change. As I said, I think you got the speckles and metallic flake nice. I'd just change the Fresnel effect. The thing is the overall reflection really needs to be adjustable by the end user. Only in showrooms and magazine ads are cars that shiny.

Yes the lighting was poor - was only trying to match the test render that tez had shown and that was dominated by an overhead light. In reality I'd always use a lot more global illumination.

I've never tried rubber. I've seen good ones here and there but not looked at how its done. Did you like yours in the end or no?

Question for you - one of your shaders had the Edge_Blend plugged into the Quality input of the Reflect node. The reasoning for that escapes me. Did you really want poorer quality in the middle and better quality reflections on the edge?

yes, actually I did want poor quality in the middle, this was after much staring at my car.

as you likely know, the paint on a car is far from flat and smooth, when looking at it on angles, the reflections are alot clearer because you cant see the reflections on the "indented" areas, but when your looking at the paint straight on, the reflections arent as crisp as the surface isnt flat.  I tried to simulate this with both bump mapping and displacement mapping, unfortunately both methods did not give the desired results, and both dramatically increased render times (displacement especially). So I thought I'd go with the edge blend node in the quality setting. seemed to work!

As to the rubber I created, its ok, but looks nothing like a real car tyre, over all I was far from happy with it. I should really try again now that I am alot better in the node room. shading a tyre is alot harder than you first think LOL

Hey sorry I didn't come back to this for a whole week - I got distracted.

I'm pretty sure you don't want to lower the reflection quality like that. Instead, I think your brain was interpreting the reduced reflection amount due to the Fresnel effect as a poorer quality reflection. My experiments show that when you lower the Poser Reflect Quality parameter, it actually pixellates the results, which is not only lower quality but also not realistic.

Here's your Sparkle/Red modified to include the Fresnel effect. Any nodes that are closed means I didn't touch those - they are the same as you had them. I also found out why it looked blue - because you had blue=35 in the Diffuse_Color! I changed that to pure red here. Also it is important to >> turn off the Reflection_Lite_Mult - never use that. It multiples the reflection with the amount of light hitting the object at each point. This has nothing to do with reality and dims the reflections.

The Edge_Blend Inner_Color is RGB(15, 15, 15) - anything else that looks black is black.

For some reason I just couldnt get it to look like yours.  If its posible could you please send me the scene file so I can load it into poser and learn from it.  You have got it looking realy nice.  Do you have the poser 7 car or any car as if like to see your material on a car.

Thanks.

tez12,

Are you using Poser 6? My experience with P6 is there is a bug that only involves reflections of the upper part of sphere when you are inside the sphere. I have no idea why this happens, but if you're using depth-mapped shadows then it never renders reflections correctly unless I enable "Reuse Shadow Maps" and I'm not using a freshly generated shadow map. 

What I do is enable shadow map reuse, then I start a render. As soon as the shadow map is done and the actual rendering starts, I cancel the render. Then I can start another render and it looks right. Thereafter, unless you recalc the shadow map, everything is fine. If you move the lights or props and want a new shadow map, you must once again start a render, let it finish generating the fresh shadow map, and cancel it. Then render.

Meanwhile, if you want me to send you the scene file, I will. However, even compressed it is too big to post here, so if you send me an email through rendo, then I'll have your email address and I'll send you the file.

Also, regarding the the reflection bug, this does not happen with ray-traced shadows - only depth-mapped shadows.

Email sent to you.

Thanks.

As far as skydomes are concerned, RDNA has a free one. Note that some features go back to the P4 era. With P5 and later you don't need to use the versions with built-in tiling, as tiling can be set in the image_map node (u_scale and v_scale),

Right guys.  Here are some results after playing with the cool material bagginsbill
gave me.  I took the quality of the reflectioin down to 0.1 where the reflection speared more sharp and tight.  I generaly played with colour in addition to a few tweaks here and there. I made a sky dome in hexagon and got some textures inside of it.  Theres more to come and much better renders and shaders to look forward too in the near future.

Thanks again for all who posted and helped.