I've been trying to make rubber foam, like what mattresses are (sometimes) made of, but so far with little luck. I'm probably going around this the wrong way, because with everything I've sdeen BB do, I'm no longer ruling out that it is indeed possible to make believable foam rubber in Poser.

Only I can't figure out how. It has this slight transparency along the edges that I can't find a way to mimic. I've tried adding a little transparency but it doesn't even show...

So here's my mattress... which looks more like a block of concrete...

And here's the node setup. I used the GC2 macro to add gamma correction to the material. Not sure if it makes any difference, but surely it can't harm? :)

Write to SM and tell them you want real subsurface scattering materials in Poser.

I think what makes it look more like concrete are the sharp edges... most people associate soft more rounded edges with a mattress.
And, foam usually consists of lots of air, so you have small round "airbubbles" not the small long stripes seen in your shader...
Maybe you should try a soft spots node instead of the granite for your bump.

That's all I can think of right now...

Martin

Part of your problem is the UVmap of the model - it looks like you've scaled a box down to make it flatter, so the "foam" is coming out in long streaks instead of 1:1 proportions shown in the material editor.  It's also probably too rough and the bump strength is very likely too high - what is your default unit, feet? inches?  0.35 is very high even for inches or centimeters, for something like a foam mattress.

 So I'm wrong here, BB? There's no way to fake it in a way that'll look even remotely real?

OK at least I can stop wasting time on it then... sigh

Martin I think the stripes is due to how the underlying model is scaled. This is just the Poser Rounded box used as an example. Not the best model. But then it's the material itself I'm after at the moment, not so much the mattress :)

Well I can't figure out how to do it - everything looks like a pumice stone.

http://sites.google.com/site/fleshforge2/Home/free-stuff/foam
http://www.sharecg.com/v/42145/Poser/Foam-Mattress-Prop alternate

welcome to it if you want it.

 It looks promising, Pjz. I'll give it a try :)

BB - pumice stone, that's those grey lava thingies for scrubbing, right? If so, then the description is spot on L (unfortunately)

I still think your major problem with the first attempt was the bump strength was way too high, along with the UVmap being smushed (that's why I threw in a model of a proper shaped mattress).

Hey, it looks like a Tempurpedic! Thanks so much Pjz99!

Trekkie, I'd still be interested in that shader of yours.

Is there a reason why you couldn't use a photo for this texture? That seems a far simpler answer to me. Or is your point trying to do it without a photo texture as an exercise? 

It's not a color texture at all, the color of the material is completely uniform - in the real world, this stuff is mixed as a liquid and is a solid color.  What gives foam rubber like this its distinctive appearance is the shape and specularity (and as BB said, the way light bounces around inside it, but I'm not bothering to fake that really).  A photo would be fine, as long as the photo perfectly matched your scene's lighting, which it probably won't.  With a procedural material, the lighting can be changed to pretty much anything and the material is still passable, or at any rate, no worse than the same pic anyhow.

Yeah that displacement is pretty overboard, that's why it looks so stretched along the edges even though the edges are rounded.  The flat parts look all right but I don't think you'd ever get the edges to not look stretched with any kind of geometry, with that much displacement.

Yes I would have to agree with you. Looking at a sponge with its' smaller holes within larger holes in the material really has me at a definite loss. All I can say is I gave it a try and the sponge won.

Pumice stone, again, YngPhoenix. Welcome to the frustrated sponge-maker's club. grin

PJ - You have an incredible eye and a clever mind. I did not think to skip the bump altogether. Doh. Your foam is very effective.

Well actually there is a little bump going on (in fact that's almost all of what I have going on).  It's only kinda convincing at a moderate distance away though.

Ouch! Sharp edges there, YngPhoenix!

Bevel them, turn down the bump, use diffuse lighting, and you'll get something much more acceptable. Remember, sponges should have no specular highlights, no sharp light/shadow divides.

There's a teddy bear in one of the Poser freebie installs that came with a very clever falloff map driven texture that's pretty close.

No problem. Sponge won again and I'm out for the count. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Much of the trouble is you will never simulate this surface with a grayscale height map, whether with bump or with displacement.  The best you can hope for is a cratered surface, and on close inspection it will fail.  The cavities in the surface of a real sponge are very frequently going to be the same X/Y coordinates but have overlapping and different Z surfaces (relative to a given polygon).  Not a math wiz but I don't see any possible way to represent this with a grayscale map of any kind.  I think the Cellular node can probably represent this kind of surface mathematically, but the problem then is how do you shade that onto a 2d surface of polygons?

Quite right pj. The cavities arc past 180 degrees. To do them would require vector displacement, not just displacement along the normal. In vector displacement, you move any point to anywhere, not just on a line along the normal. Firefly actually has this ability, but it is not exposed to us in the material room.

Quote - Much of the trouble is you will never simulate this surface with a grayscale height map, whether with bump or with displacement.  The best you can hope for is a cratered surface, and on close inspection it will fail.  The cavities in the surface of a real sponge are very frequently going to be the same X/Y coordinates but have overlapping and different Z surfaces (relative to a given polygon).  Not a math wiz but I don't see any possible way to represent this with a grayscale map of any kind.  I think the Cellular node can probably represent this kind of surface mathematically, but the problem then is how do you shade that onto a 2d surface of polygons?

This is precisely what normal maps are for . . . They can't capture the overlap, but they do produce a much more complex (and realistic) geometry for this kind of situation.

Poser Pro supports normal maps, but I don't think Poser 8 does . . .

pjz99 that looks pretty good for sofa cushion foam, like we used to steal out of the couch for goalie pads in road hockey, but then, maybe I just got hit with too many frozen rock hard orange balls.

Quote - This is precisely what normal maps are for . . . They can't capture the overlap, but they do produce a much more complex (and realistic) geometry for this kind of situation.

Poser Pro supports normal maps, but I don't think Poser 8 does . . .

Neither can represent a sponge surface - the best you can get is a cratered surface.  Bagginsbill has me convinced that normal mapping offers no practical advantage over bump mapping in any case.

... and I said that this is what vector displacementis for and Firefly has it.

Vector displacement is to normal maps as displacement is to bump maps. It is the fully 3D version, not a fake.

when thinking about what's missing, one word comes to mind,.."moist"

bagginsbill how do you know that Poser supports vector displacement? i thoguth this is only out for some months now.

i think Mudbox is the only one who can generate vector displ.

I was discussing possible things to add to Firefly with Stefan Werner on the phone a few months back. (You know who he is, right?) We were discussing more complex material capabilities, possibilities for the future. In that conversation, he told me that Firefly displacement is already vector based (3 values instead of just 1) and also that the existing transparency implementation is actually capable of using a color (3 values instead of 1). Neither of these abilities were exposed in the material room, but they are there.

 Oh wow. I'd lost track of this thread, sorry guys!

What I was going for is actually not a sponge, more the material like in the mattress. I never meant to be so convoluted, but since I need it for a product and I didn't want to be accused of advertizing it here, I had to come up with something similar ;)

So in short it's small bits of foam I need, not something as large as a washing sponge, and far from something as bit as a mattress (although the foam is close to what is used in a mattress)

But I'm impressed at the bathing sponge YngPhoenix made, it's not half bad, and certainly better than my attempt!

PJZ I posted the nodes, do you want me to save my crappy material? *(if I still have that version saved L Not sure) I'll go look for it if you want it but it's easily recreated, just do the displacement node and add the GC2 wacro :)