Attached Link: Get the Mat Pawn prop on this page - MatPawn.zip

I have long used a little prop I call the Boxcylball - a combination of a Poser box, cylinder, and sphere, to test or illustrate materials. It's surprising how much geometry influences appearance, especially with regard to reflections. Flat, curved in 2D, or curved in 3D, each produce unique visual signatures.

But there were a number of things I didn't like about the boxcylball. One was it didn't have enough of a flat surface facing up. Two was that the sphere part would hint at how "organic" things would look, but it was a bit too regular to really indicate it. Three, the hard edges of the box and cylinder never illustrated how round edges will behave. Four, there was no thin part that might show off the new subsurface scattering.

So I decided to invent a new prop that I might use to illustrate materials, and share with others so they can use it, too.

I'm interested in thoughts or advice on how to improve it, or perhaps make other variants for special purposes.

I call this the Matpawn - because it reminds me of the pawn chess piece.

Here it is in wireframe.

You can download it at the linked page above.

Here are the boxcylball and the matpawn, side by side. I think the matpawn is a big improvement as a material illustration.

Here is the matpawn showing the diversity of a single material - brushed stainless steel.

Here's a sampler of wildly different materials.

Here it is illustrating a waxy material.

Thanks!

lmk

Looks very nice and handy.  I would be nice to have area that is not the shader to see how it might fit with other material.

Vray-materials.de has a sample scene for Vray materials in Max, which I enclose example

Ingenious!!

The VRay one (and a few others) all leave something important out - the vertical surfaces (flat and cylindrical). That's the point of why I didn't just use one of those.

You do not have a sense of what a wall of the material will be like as you look down towards the floor. That was what I was missing in the VRay balls and others like it. You do not get a sense of a pole. (cylinder)

I was adjusting the blur levels on my new metals, while looking at spheres. It totally threw me off, and I over-blurred a lot of materials, which I must now fix.

To understand blur at a "gut" instinct level, you must have flat, vertical surfaces.

Good idea BB!

Quote - I'm interested in thoughts or advice on how to improve it, or perhaps make other variants for special purposes.

Add ERC slaved to zTran so that it turns into a rook if it advances 8 PNU. ;)

Or, on a more serious note, perhaps a couple of morphs would be a good idea. You mentioned a lack of thin things in the original prop, so perhaps a simple morph to flatten the prop in the z axis would be a good idea, and perhaps another morph to pull part of the "sphere" in so it would become flat, then eventually concave.

And here I thought BB didn't model :o)

Good idea though.

Thanks :)

Thanks for the MatPawn.

Good idea, thank you!