Since 2.63 was released, I've been having a play with Blender again. Did a tutorial, made some stuff, and now want to get down and dirty with Blender's new Cycles materials. This is assuming:

1- Blender Internal materials are specific to Blender Internal... Cycles uses something else
2- When you load a scene originally material-ed for BI and try to convert to Cycles, you'll see "Use Nodes" in the material editor head

So, I'm assuming that Cycles materials are significantly different to what went before. Cycles, at this point, doesn't 'do hair' or SSS, apparently. This is still in its infancy, I get the impression. But overall, there's some amazing stuff you can do with it, already.

A few caveats: whilst Cycles can take advantage of your GPU, CUDA is not CUDA. My laptop has a Geforce GT 230M. Apparently the hardware in this GPU cannot handle the requirements of 2.63 Cycles. You can download builds that will work for older GPUs, but the feature set will be lacking certain things. So, unfortunately for my poor laptop, I cannot use Cycles to do renders. I can set stuff up, however.

Anyway, the point of this thread is to explore Cycles materials a bit.

When you go to materials, add a new material, it defaults to Diffuse BSDF. The node set for Diffuse is pretty simple. You'll always have your Material Output, and then connected to the Surface channel is the Diffuse BSDF node, with only Color and Roughness as input channels. There is a Glass BSDF material, which has two additional channels:

• Distribution: which defaults to Beckmann and
• IOR: which defaults to 1.45

Which gives you this as a result:

Already I'm really liking this renderer and material set!

More to follow later...

I REALLY like Cycles a lot. It agrees fully with my video card. But when I saw it the materials were node based I cried a little bit...LOL.

Laurie

Nice image :) Wish I had some time to play, and also wish I coud get the hang of cycles better.

Well, Laurie, they sort of are. It's kind of cool: you can muck around with the nodes in the node editor and see the changes in your Material panel. So, if you want, you can get these flash node-based material thingies (screen-cap pictures) you can string together, then have a look how it changes your material panel stuff and do it thusly from then on.

So, for like my teapot, above, the tutorial I did in order to make the dang thing suggested doing this in the material panel (make sure the teapot is selected):

1- For Ceramic-looking material, diffuse will be mixed with glossy
2- So, choose "Mix Shader" from the Surface drop down list
3- Name this material "ceramic".
4- Choose "Diffuse" for the first shader type and "Glossy" for the other.

I'm not sure - but I don't think so - that Mix in Cycles is like the blender node in Poser, since the Fac value determines the percentage of the mix in Cycles, where Poser's blender() node uses this, IIRC:
k * Value_2 + (1-k) * Value_1

where k is the Blending value.

In Blender Cycle's Mix shader node, a value of 1.0 for Fac means that the second shader (in this case: glossy) will have 100% effect and the first shader will have an effect of 0%. 0.500 will mix 50% of both shaders. Here we want a combination of 10% glossy shader and 90% of diffuse, so one would set the Fac value to 0.10.

Hope I can keep that straight.

So, here is the mat panel for Ceramic:

and the node set for same:

Easy enough to see how this all sort-of works, so far.

So, in my search for materials for Cycles, I came across this:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/category/cycles/

Gold mine! They even have a reasonable facsimile of SSS! Off to study all this for a bit... WOW! :woot:

shame about the lappy, I had just sorta got into cycles when it kicked my gpu off its friends list ;-) so I spent my poser cash on a new gtx 560 with 2 gig of ram, I forget to check out blendswop will have to grab some of those an see how they work. You gonna try to talk BB into making a matmatic for cycles????

Do you duel boot? if so do u use grub or ?? I have tried grub in the past and it works fine for a few weeks/months but always ended up with a format, was looking at plugin drives then just swop drives to use linux

are you using 2.63 ?? I seem to make it crash (alot (in windows)) yet same file/setups work ok in 2.61 is 2.63 more stable under linux?

Quote - shame about the lappy, I had just sorta got into cycles when it kicked my gpu off its friends list ;-) so I spent my poser cash on a new gtx 560 with 2 gig of ram, I forget to check out blendswop will have to grab some of those an see how they work. You gonna try to talk BB into making a matmatic for cycles????

Apparently someone is already coding shaders in Blender Python, although they say it is tedious. But then, I get the feeling they are coding an entire scene, not just a node set. If BB wanted to have a look at this programme... dunno. From my perspective, materials are a completely different kettle of fish, to my view several levels or more sophisticated than Poser's Firefly materials. But, that's just me.

Quote - Do you duel boot? if so do u use grub or ??

Yes, I do - hardly if ever boot into Win7 these days, can't be a***sed, productivity goes into the toilet whilst in Windows. I use GRUB. When I do boot into Win7, it asks me to do a scandisk on boot, which I stop immediately, because that trashes GRUB. Have I mentioned I hate Windows? Such an arrogant, irritating, insulting work environment that assumes everything is more important than what you are doing.
I do have a desktop that does nothing but Windows7. No internet, no AV, no NOTHING else but Poser and Vue 10. So, it runs fast and clean. Yeah, I check it periodically from the laptop over the network to make sure it's still clean, which it is.

Quote - are you using 2.63 ?? I seem to make it crash (alot (in windows)) yet same file/setups work ok in 2.61 is 2.63 more stable under linux?

Yes, I am. In both Windows and Linux (in Linux on my laptop, I can set up materials and do that preview thingie, but can't render because the graphics card is a bit pov - GeForce GT 230M - I'll have to get a special build from Graphicall.org for that). That said, Blender 2.63 Final has been quite stable in both environments.

Is this mouthwatering or what??? :woot:

Learning about the Cycles water shader from this scene... free download, too!

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!

Vue who?

;)

Laurie

What an amazing picture.

I have tried Blender a few months back, and I found it's a bit tough to learn, so I stick to PS lol

Great job (thinking of learning Blender again)..

Al

Thanks, Al. One of the main reasons I've gotten stuck into Blender so much more this go around is because of the ease of use feature. I'll admit: I am leveraging my knowledge of hotkeys for modelling some of this stuff, but there is so much more available in terms of help and examples so that these sorts of renders are really quite doable. It's that step at a time thing.

And what you can get out of this is quite mindboggling.

This probably won't float LaurieA's boat any, for those who simply love matmatic / Python scripting of shaders, Cycles is going with Open Shading Language scripting in the future (on the todo list for Brecht). One thoroughly hopes the scripting itself will be in Python, not like the native OpenGL language itself, which is basically ANSI C. :blink:

BTW, Brecht indicates that he's always open to having people help with his projects. So....

hopefully more ammo for you RV

http://www.minimaexpresion.es/?cat=68&lang=en

found this yesterday, not had time to try it yet but does look interesting, have fun

Yep, this is gold, mate. Thanks for that: you're a legend. Wow, the whole node setUp... procedural wood. How good is this! :woot: Really awesome find, Hedd!

So, are we going to the dark side?

If I had a direct export from Poser to Blender, you bet I'd go to the darkside ;).

Laurie

RV plan on getting a couple of these http://www.nemax.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=20&products_id=141

then I will be running unbuntu when I feel like it but NO duelbooting lol , just shut down swop drives an restart, might even try that cut down unbuntu someone posted for blender lol

do you append from one file to another with the cycles mats?? haven't tried the append thing yet so not sure how it works but putting lots of nodes in everytime you want something is so slow

heres another link for you RV,

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?254881-ANT-Landscape-World-Update

dont be put off by title is about cycles and the ant

Thanks for that, Hedd.

All I'm doing these days is reading. Believe it or not, not even saying anything. There's nothing to say at all. I'm about 2/3rds of the way throught the Brecht Easter-Egg thread (Cycles announcement and discussion) - a lot of shaders and discussions there, with the obligatory forum opinion posturing that you tend to see everywhere, but the cool thing is watching this new renderer catch on, materials be developed and played with... it is AMAZING! But wow, a lot of really knowledgeable people on things materials: clearly, this mob have been dong lots with BI (Blender Internal) and there's a fair reluctance to give it up, even though it's disorganised, filled with cheats, impossible to restructure.

They are willing to share, though. Because the programme is open-source, they can share scenes, called .blends. Which is an amazing teaching tool, particularly in this new Cycles environment, since now I can look at shaders first-hand, then render the finished .blend on my system and get that artist's results. In Poser, you can't really do that usually, since a lot of content is for-pay.

Back to reading... head-down/bum-up. Eye's bubbling. :woot:

Thanks for starting another necessary and amazing thread, Robyn! I must admit my reaction to the node-based materials was one of trepidation...but I am getting my head around it. Slowly.  Too busy modelling at the moment to really get into cycles, but it is on the to-do list for sure. I also got the new dogwaffle and that is eating up my time....so much fun.

Thanks, Nanette. I'm just learning really basic stuff at the moment, like how to use HDRs in Cycles (incredibly effective even if you turn transparent on!! - like Poser Skydome, but not visible), and building very basic stuff. Like Glass. Well, not just any glass... coloured glass.

What's really cool is: with open-source software, there is this incredible freedom to add to what's there. Well, like node systems. BlenderArtists.org have several sort-of Bagginsbills - whether they do it as precisely as he does is not what I'm saying, I am saying they are at least that creative and willing to try to create materials! - who, when they come up with some really cool idea, actually go to the development version of Blender, and add their own code, then submit for review! Is this amazing or what? Imagine BB were able to say: "hang on, back in a trice, I'll just whip that node out quick-smart, and you'll be right!!" and next thing you know, you have a shader-in-a-node for Poser.

I'm thoroughly impressed with that capacity to actually add stuff to trunk. Not Python add-ons, core stuff. That's how BMesh started. And Cycles is still a WIP, particularly materials. It is so incredibly amazing to be doing all this whilst it is all happening!!

Still struggling with "World" settings - might have a look at what others are doing.

on the bright side RV, noodles never get as complicated as BB's spaggetti rofl,   agree more documentation would be good and more tuts not just the really basic ones we see at the mo, but even when I find a good tut it dont always work in "my blender"  sometimes they use a node I haven't got (thats annoying lol ) or they change the name of the node! that can be confusing for a min or more. Then theres the "hidden" extras (not really hidden I just didnt know they was there ) like having to go into datablocks to turn on micro displacemnt and stuff, makes me wonder what else is in there that I can mess up ;-)  oh well guess if it was easy it wouldnt be so much fun

I guess that it's all about Cycles still being very much "beta". Yes, it works, but a lot of things are changing from day to day ... for example: you won't find 'closure' nodes anymore. I can't find where to do material previews: some people seem to manage to get that to work, but I can't.

Downside: you think you know about how a node works, and they'll change it on ya. Oh well. :blink:

if you set the texture display to rendered you get the work window to show the mats as you alter them, that can be a bit slow if the window is "full size" depending on ur comp lol, since I use twin monitors I have a small window on second set to rendered (also have my node window on that screen ) does make it a lot of fun when u grab a light an drag it round in scene and see what its doin in little rendered window,  hope that helps but I'm not sure its what you was asking rofl

ps I'm messing with this at the mo but not getting the same results as they do

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?243346-Cycles-Volume-Textures

did have to get a new blender (link in thread second page I think) cos' it has Storms patch, be a while before I try building my own blender lol

Yep, getting all that, Hedd. Where problems appear to occur is like with my environment - in all those flash videos, I see them scanning all over their HDRs and I set up nodes the same way, but all i see is a coloured blur. Clearly, I'm doing something drastically wrong. But what.

Quote - ps I'm messing with this at the mo but not getting the same results as they do

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?243346-Cycles-Volume-Textures

did have to get a new blender (link in thread second page I think) cos' it has Storms patch, be a while before I try building my own blender lol

Sheesh, you're light-years ahead of me... still struggling with basics. Just want a reasonably good working - predictable - environment, to start off with, so I can tell what my textures are doing. Then, getting bump-maps down. A lot to get the noggin around... :bored: :huh:

think you have a much better understanding of the whys an whats hun, I'm very much a "monkey see monkey do" kind of guy!! if I do it long enough it does all click but then blender evolves so fast I dont think I'll ever get there

hope it helps

I finally used your find: those procedural wood textures.

It appears there is a Bagginsbill of Cycles materials... the developer of this material: Wesvdes. His focus is on maths: he apparently developed this using some fairly sophisticated formulas (well, they would be to me: he probably thought the task mundane and simple). I'm hoping for a tutorial.

is quite a few doing some awesome stuff, dunno if you have used the "matlib" ? I have it set up on an older blender (for BI ) but its got a few cycles mats too now (60+) so will be looking more at that tomorrow ;-) only 9pm here but just had me painkillers so brain will be mush in half hour, opps forgot link

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?252957-Cycles_Matlib-Beta-Release!-Help-Wanted!&p=2124537&viewfull=1#post2124537

if nowt else it should give us a way to save the better experiments lol

have fun ................. but get some sleep!!!! its good for the brain

Having a look at MatLib now - this is excellent study material!

Great thread here!

Cycles is definitely worth looking at, makes a simple scene look fantastic. Here's a render with a car I created and the node setup for the material (colour changes for the other cars). The scene is lit by the white background color and a strength of 2 and a few small planes above with a strength of 1.

I'm sure you saw that material collection, TruForm...  Meta-Androcto put it into a sort of library... all sorts of cool materials to play with!

This shader looks good... very straight-forward.

I haven't seen that actually, thanks for the link. I did find this tutorial specific to cars with a node setup that is a lot more detailed (and better) than mine. Much more realistic.

nice work!! think using a hdr for reflections would look better, this link has a few nice angmaps an spheremaps (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?24038-Free-high-res-skymaps-(Massive-07-update!)/page11 )

keep up the good work

You're absolutely right heddheld! Awesome link you got there, thanks!

Looks a lot better:

 Lit by nothing other than the HDR

Ooooo...nice! :D

Laurie

That is stunning work, truForm! Well done!

Would you be willing to share your world settings? Hedd already kindly showed me his - thanks, Hedd! - but I'm always keen to see how others do this.

My World settings? Or the Composite settings?

Here's how the HDR image is set up:

And that's in your world settings, I take it, for your HDR. I haven't even messed with composite settings: wouldn't know where that is done.

Your settings are significantly different to Hedd's... Hedd's settings have yielded good results... I'll try yours next. Thanks for that.

im trying to get into the nodes in cycles but an issue is causing me to want to kill it

no matter what settings i use i get speckles in the materials

Quote - im trying to get into the nodes in cycles but an issue is causing me to want to kill it

no matter what settings i use i get speckles in the materials

There is this massive thread called Brecht's Easter Egg:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-rendering/page1

In this thread are 5 pages of references to "black spots" ... the consensus appears to be: don't use any lights but "Sun" - the rest of the lights don't work. The best lighting appears to come from emitters, which includes the HDRs used in "World".

Btw, side note: the rendo forum developers would do well to have a look at BlenderArtists.org forum features, which include searching on a thread!

Hey Robyn, yes that was my world settings. Note that the HDR is in an Environment texture, not an Image Texture, otherwise it won't map properly. And also the images should either be equirectangular or a mirror ball:

 You should get a complete 360º angle of the image when you look around the scene in the rendered view sort of like street view in google maps. You change it in the Environment Texture:

 Let me know if you want the composite settings. It's actually simple to get the object to look like it's in the real world.

and for a new issue how do i post the images here????

so far im confuzzled

That might be it, truForm!! Might be why i can't seem to get anything but a blur for background in my Cycles "preview-render". Please do share this with me: I haven't looked at composite settings at all... know nothing about those.

@unbroken-fighter Click the insert image button:

It's a picture of a tree on the far right of the tools

A dialog pops up asking for the URL (place where the image is stored). Basically if you have an online storage account such as Dropbox, 4 shared etc. you can copy that link and paste it into the 'Image URL' section. If you did it right it the image will show in the box below. Then you add a title and description. Click insert and Resize it with the points that surround the image. :)

maybe wrong but Truforms settings are pretty much same as mine (read some where u dont need the mapping for world output (but has to be equirectangular) but if you had a dif type of image maybe it could be fiddled lol, my settings let you do the full 360 if u wanted to

@unbroken-fighter you have to set the render settings up, default is way to low to get a clean image(intergrator and try at least 500) you can set the preview to 0 an it will render forever (set preview mode to rendered) stop it when its clean an save out then(not tried the saving but u know more about blender then me ), what RV said about lights is true only the sun is "fixed" but can load a plane(anything) and set it to emit and it works like a light

have fun an stay happy

Okay, how to composite CG elements into the real world:

First setup your HDR image in the world settings so that it shows up as the background in your view (explained above in older post):

This is the Rendered view, with perspective view.

Place your object in the scene (if it isn't already) and add a plane, make sure it's below the object so that it becomes the floor. The plane must be larger than the object and it should be placed in its own layer, seperate from the main object.

I placed the plane on Layer 11 and the main object on Layer 1. This plane will be creating the shadows.

Next step is to try and align the view with the object so that the angle is matched.

It's easier to align the object to the view when you use Render view.

Then comes the setup of the Render layers, this is why you separated the object from the plane.

Go to the Render Panel

And scroll down to the Layers

Blender already has 1 layer by default called ** Render layer**. We'll rename this to something more meaningful like ** Object** by typing into the ** Name:** field. This layer should only render the object, nothing else. Make sure nothing else but the layer that has the object is selected in the layer, in my case, it's ** layer 1**.

Click the + button next to the Object layer to add another and rename this Render Layer to Shadow.

Choose the layer that the plane is on, for me it's layer 11.

An extra setting for the Shadow Render layer is to check the AO option, it's found below the layers

Then scroll up a little until you see a category labelled film

Check the ** Transparent** option

Once you do this it disables the background from being seen in the render. This is correct for the object and shadow as we don't want the background to be merged with the render but we still need the background on its own layer. The problem is that the transparent option is a general setting, not specific to a Render layer, which means it's either on for all layers or off for all layers. A work around is to add a new scene, so that we get independant render settings but remain in the same scene.

Choose Link Objects to keep the same scene that you currently have.

Now in the render settings you can uncheck the ** Transparent** option in the ** film** category so that the background can be rendered. And then we'll need to add another ** Render Layer** for this scene. I called it ** Background** and chose any blank layer (meaning a layer without objects) because the background is visible in all layers

![Background layer](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15049450/Images/Forums/Background%20Layer.jpg "Background layer")

You can delete the other Render layers with the - button, it won't affect the other scene.

Switch from Scene.001 to Scene. Thats all you need to do for the scene

Open up a Node Editor window

(You may also want a UV /Image Editor so you can view the results, link it to the ** Render result**

** **

Switch over to the **  ** compositor****   by clicking on the 3rd icon and check the **Use Nodes** Box

 Now setup your nodes like this:

Explanation:

You should have 3 Render layers (Add>Input>Render Layers)

2 of these layers should be linked to Scene while the other is linked to Scene.001

The 1st Render Layer should be the Object (find it in the drop down list)

The 2nd Render Layer should be the Shadow (find it in the drop down list)

The 3rd Render Layer should be the Background (find it in the drop down list)

You'll see that there's an extra option for the Shadow Render Layer called AO. This is because you added it to the list of passes that Blender should take into account.

AO must be linked to an Add node (the Add node is actually a mix node that is set to add in the drop down list Add>Color>Mix) The problem here is that the plane doesn't fill the entire image, it just takes up the lower part of it which creates the black surrounding (see it in the preview). The only black area in this scene should be the shadows. To fix this you add an Invert node (Add>Color>Invert) to the Alpha output of the Shadow Layer (the unwanted black part of the image is basically the alpha). So this node inverts the black to white. Then you join the output of the invert node into the other input of the Add node where the AO is connected to. After this you should have a fully white image with just a shadow.

Using the Multiply node(the Multiply node is actually a mix node set to multiply in the drop down list Add>Color>mix) connect the Background layer and Shadow layer (through the add connector).

Before going into othe final Composite node, add an Alpha over node (Add>Alpha Over) to combine the object layer with the other 2. It's important that the Multiply node goes into the top input and the Object Render Layer goes into the bottom one.

Then the output of that goes into the Composite node.

Done! Press F12 to see the final result.

For further enhancements, you could use a curves node (Add>Color>Curves) to brighten or darken each layer to make them fit better. Drag the node's window between the other nodes 'connection' until they turn orange and it will connect itself.

BTW, if the node editor isn't making a difference to the render, make sure that you have the Compositor checked. Go to the Render panel and scroll all the way to the bottom, under Post Processing

i know 2.49b like rthe back of my hand but the new cycles in 2.63 has me having fits

i need to sit down and read some tuts on it before i ever get anything done