Rhia474 posted at 7:56PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419468

That site is amazing. I'm rendering a quickie tabletop (wood) with a patterned brass texture on a ball, and it already looks 200% better than most stuff I tried as 'Superfly shader' before for those type of textures.

Thank you. Off to obsess a bit and experiment. Those tutorials Caisson posted go WAYYY over my head. Heck, most of his explanations go way over my head, I really need small words. Or just tell me 'this goes here, hook it up', this is the value. LOL.

Completely agree with you, because a lot of people confuses Superfly with a complex web of cycles nodes, adding this and multiplying that. Which is very useful when creating certain shaders, like the glass one we had a long discussion about in another thread and some diamond shader. So you still need a few of them for these materials, which is obviously a shame, because such materials should have been supplied with Poser, these would have been extremely useful. Like having a good PBR glass shader, water, diamond, gems etc. Where the physical shader struggles and because these are the ones that 95% of all people have issues with, because they don't know how to hook up all these nodes.

What is especially nice with PBR textures (using texture maps as above) is that they are extremely easy to read or understand. And since you have used some of the textures from that site, you would probably agree that they are very easy to understand, because they are just grayscale maps, the more white there is, the more rough a material is, so you can simply open the roughness map in Gimp or Photoshop and adjust the white/black values, if you want to make it more or less rough. You don't have to worry about any of the other maps.

And again, since these are PBR you know that they will look correct regardless of which lighting you use and that they will look the same for someone else that uses it as well.

Because as you can see in the example I showed above with the brass spheres, lets assume it was part of a product, so I adjust the lighting in my scene so it looks good in my promotional renders, however anyone that would buy it, might get completely different results, because the material react so differently depending on the lighting they use. And its extremely difficult for content creators to combat this, because how could we? We can't test all lighting settings that people might use to make sure that the product looks like we intended. But PBR solves most of these issues, despite the glass, gems, water etc. because they require cycle shaders and people might create them differently. So I would suggest (If you like the results of the glass shaders in the other thread) that you copy them down and save them to your library. Because it seem to work for all types of glass.