Greetings all!

  I just made some coffeebeans and now need a material that could help them look more real. The current material I used is my attempt at a coffee mat. If anyone has a mat for this that would fit nicely, please let me know.

hmm.. depends kinda on ur lighting i think. the highlight is too green.

Oops, sorry about that. Here's the same thing but in default light/sky.

I don't have a material but as a long time member of www.coffeegeek.com...

Most freshly roasted coffee has got patches of slightly different colours in it.  Slightly slick darker oily patches over a deep brown.  The other thing is that the groove in the middle quite often has a light streak that runs down the middle (it's where the chaff created during roasting doesn't come off.

You'll want to have a bump map on the material as the surface won't be smooth.  One thing on the model is that the bean I've got in front of me is convex at the top while your model looks like it's concave.  A green coffee bean would be concave but during the roast the carbon-dioxide in the bean expands so the whole thing looks fatter and plumper.

I might have a play with materials for you if I get a chance.

That's very interesting info there, Uncle_Riotous. I hadn't known about the concave/convex differences. What I did is that pretty much every day I'm at one of the local coffee shops. Since I telecommute often, the coffee shops are somewhat my workplace. So I borrowed a coffee bean from one of them and made a model. The center groove is still unfinished, as I've noticed often there's stuff in there that I guess joined the bean to it's other half. I did notice, however, some of the beans do have darker blotches, especially the more oily ones.

What I hope to do tomorrow during a break is try to model some of the stuff that's in the groove area. I do hope to model slightly different variations of the bean--adding imperfections--because no two beans are alike.

The material in the images here is something I had made for an earlier project. I just changed the color a bit. Someone has suggested the color should be lighter.

What I would like to do eventually would be to model a green (or red) coffee bean, like one sees in a photo of the beans still on the plant. I'm not sure of the scale compared to a roasted bean.

Tonight I did an espresso mug from one of the coffee books I have ("world encyclopedia of coffee") and I'm now wondering how to make the foam look authentic. I think there's a beer foam post somewhere here to look up.....

It's like for every idea there's always something to research. :-)

Attached Link: Coffee Bean MAT

I spotted your request, knew I had something in materials that was close, fiddled with it a bit.

You're welcome to it if it fits the bill.

Cool Project...I love Coffee too

Cool!  I'll try it on and see how it fits. Thanks!

Last night I quickly did an espresso mug. Tossed it into B6 for a quick test render to see how things might look. The foam is a mess.... I'm working on fixing that. Beer foam tutorials don't seem to be of the right type of texture. I am now debating whether the correct approach would be to take close up photos of read espresso and try to map that to the surface of the drink.

Note, though, things are not completely to scale. Some of the mug's details are lost... especially the interior of the glass--there's a one inch space of thick glass at the base, above the chrome part. I have not finished modeling this mug... the handle isn't yet done.

Any advice dealing with the foam would be really really appreciated.

That's lookin kinda sweet! I think still that the specularity might be a bit too... wide-spread. Also i think it should probably be a bit more orangy in color? Only subtly so, but still.