Beyond the dark specular, check out what happens with other colors when you set the Gamma=1. Some things come out brighter than they should, not just darker. It's very hard to tune a non-linear shader. This is why most people have not made a suede like this. It's too hard.
 

 Those suede mats look absolutely amazing. :) Thanks for posting them!

Don't forget that people who make shaders without gamma correction are still doing something about gamma. They're just not doing it with the straightforward technique I'm using. They end up pushing some values up, and others down, and all in the pursuit of getting it to look right with the particular lighting they're using. But if the material is rendered in very different lighting, it fails.

The only response curve that is correct in all lighting situations is the linear one - the one that matches reality. That response curve is not achievable except when you put adjustments in the shader that are close to those produced by gamma correction. Some people do it by other means, and don't even realize what they're doing. They're just tweaking until it looks right. Well - I don't have to tweak.

That's the gamma corrected one. Pretend you don't know it is GC. Just use the one that works better.

You're welcome, grappo.

I like to see renders - show me.

Even though it is easy enough to edit the 3 parameters, and most of the time all you need to edit is the color, I can see where some users who've never entered the advanced material room at all would still be daunted.

You probably want to build a dozen or so shades and save them as pre-defined materials.

Here I picked a few, for testing. Stay with highly unsaturated colors, because suede is never in a saturated stain. Light and dark are OK - just keep it desaturated.

i noticed that you are using the edgeblend for the fuzzy.

i am also using it in my free clothes.

 Well done Paul...that nails it for me.. ...great advice BB that I will note for future reference.. ...

i ike the shape of the specular. but i think the color is wrong. i dont think there is any leather that would have a yellow specular.

if it is stylistic choice then its ok.

what are you using for the leather bump? nodes or a texture?

Side note, for a model like this, with the spur coming off the back of the heel and going above the endpoint of the shin bone, I don't think you can easily rig this in Poser 7 or earlier, but in Poser 8 it was no big deal

After I work out all the variations, maybe I can render the bump maps out and just use them as traditional image-based bump maps.

 Oooh I love those, BB! I'm using your Soft Black Leather for a lot of stuff at the moment. It looks so NICE!

(now do a neoprene material please ... big blue eyes)

Oh BTW.. those "old" leather materials do not turn off GC automatically, do they? Because I see my black leather turning grey... and I assume it's because of the GC which is getting doubled from the render CG and the material CG... I haven't looked and the thing is still rendereig, I just noticed now that it was more grey than usual

In any case, the new one I'm working now is auto GC so safe to use under all circumstances.

I have a new one. Patent leather.

Meanwhile, here is the new soft black.

Attached Link: http://latexluv.deviantart.com/gallery/

Here's the proper patent leather. It's actually very similar to the car paint shader.

I was hunting through my huge collection of Motley Crue pictures for a photo that I have in mind. I couldn't find it. A couple of the band members had some fine leather jackets that were blue black. There was a definite blue sheen when the light hit the leather. I would really like a a leather shader like that. I'm probably thinking of a picture that's in a magazine in storage back in Dallas. sigh

I think I'm about done with the redo of the types of leathers I had before. The old leather shaders were not at all compatible with render GC, did not have nice organized parameters, and didn't do Fresnel reflection with exactitude. Now it does.

I'm still tweaking the "Shine" parameter so it is easy to use for all types of leather.

Here's a large render so you can see the bump pattern detail. I'm pretty satisfied with this, but was wondering if there were other patterns you think would be good to have. Don't ask for wrinkles - too hard for me. I'm not an expert yet. I have about another 3000 hours to go.

 Those shoes look painful L Nice, but painful.

And I love these new leathers. Beautiful, all of them. And with less sheen the "wrong" patent leather might work as neoprene (yea I know it's not leather but I'm going to need a good looking neoprene material one of the next days L)

I like the bumps very much. They look like leather. And I assume there's a way to change the size to fit what they're on? (or make some rougher leather if needed)

Some leather (swine skin) has like pores in it where the pig's hair used to be.. would that be possible to make?

Pattern Size = width of each pattern unit
Pattern Softness = alters the shape and overlap of the pattern units
Bump Value = depth (amount of displacement) of each pattern unit

Here I boosted the Pattern Size and Bump Value, and decreased the Pattern Softness.
 

Something like this? (Click it)

I didn't have to change anything to get this - just adjusting a couple parameters did it. I wasn't even aware the algorithm I came up with for the bump would produce this result. I found it by accident.

pretty close it is

Love it!

very good at making it look so random.

very random. fantastic.

Quote -  

Something like this? (Click it)

I didn't have to change anything to get this - just adjusting a couple parameters did it. I wasn't even aware the algorithm I came up with for the bump would produce this result. I found it by accident.

These all look fantastic as usual.
Looking at the "swine skin" above, I'm thinking that the bump could possibly be inverted and used for "goose pimples" on human skin?

In the pattern generator there is a parameter that controls the width of a bump with respect to the separation between the bumps. To make the swine skin, I made that bump width really small, and then used a negative bump value. Here it is un-inverted.

 That, as a matter 'o fact. nails it BB...great thread.. ...

I want it to work as intuitively as possible. I'm trying to achieve a simple and obvious continuum from 0 to 1 where Shine does what you expect.

That one parameter simultaneously controls many others. As shine increases:

IOR increases
Reflection Value increases
Reflection Quality increases
Reflection Blur decreases
Specular Value increases
Specular Eccentricity decreases
Specular Rolloff increases
Bump decreases

Some of these are non-linear. The notion of master "Shine" is not a concept in physics, but a subjective one that I'm trying to capture, even though I'm not sure we all exactly agree on what Shine = .3 means versus Shine = .7. But I'd like to make a decision and settle on it, because I want a standard way to control Shine in every shader I produce, so I never have to explain it again.

I think the master Shine is really important, because unless you're me or ice-boy or some other incredibly detail-oriented shader jockey, you probably don't know what to do with those 8 values to make something more or less shiny. I'm trying to capture what I do when I go for a certain look in that one parameter.

Here is a visual catalog of Shine. (Click it) The first is .05, then .1, .2, .3, etc. all the way to 1, in steps of .1. The last one is, of course, patent leather.

Does this look like what you intuitively expect "Shine" to do?

Note that below .3 it doesn't look like leather, but rather like satin. That's odd, isn't it? Do we care?

 I think this should this should make sense to most anyone, seems logical to me even tho not an actual Poser/DAZ user, if I got into it this would help lots given my previous contact with procedurals in other apps...this is turning into what I always hope to read when monitoring threads site wise...well done for taking it this far man, even though it's essentially for your own benefit initially, a lot of folks I'm sure are getting educated by all this.. ...

I added a Specular Color parameter, so Latexluv can have her "blue sheen". At least, I hope this does it. Maybe it's more complicated than that. I'd have to see it.

BB,
These are so amazing. You have really guided Poser to a new level for creating art.
The ability to achieve renders with this kind of realism in a software the price of Poser is a real gift.
I truly appreciate all of your work and gifts.
cheerio
lululee

Yep, these are all great stuff.  By the way you can plug a color map into these and have perfect control over the color pattern, if you have a suitable map (trying a holstein thing right now).

pjz,
Looking forward to seeing the color map pluged in.
Outstanding modeling on these boots.
cheerio
lululee

and here's a gallery pic of the rigged/morphed version

Very nice, Paul. If you don't care where the spots fall, you can do the same with a spots node.

What I can't do with nodes is zebra!! At least I think it's hard. No! Musn't attempt it! Must ... finish ... leather.

Thanks for the kind words, LLL.

I considered that but I have the UV seam to contend with, it's not quite that easy. is it?

and yeah I could do something like that on a 2d square surface and "bake" it, for this case it was just as fast to paint it (already done)

Actually a cheapass way to deal with the UV seam would have been to have a break in the geometry that goes all the way down the boot and place it there, but I didn't do that, I wanted to leave the physical-looking seam type stuff out of the base geometry and put it in with displacement instead.

That's fucking awesome.

   Paul,
The spots are terrific.
This is all so impressive and I will be very glad to have the new matmatic that turns off GC.
I used to be phobic about all of the nodes in the material room. As a vendor, i know that so many buyers are very new and some never venture into the material room or as Paul says, know nothing about GC.

  Once I did a VSS render in PoserPro 2010, I was completely blown away by the quality. In reality, the people who purchase our products want to create art.  With these shader that BB and others are creating (based many times on BB's info), the quality of everyone's art goes up.

   To really grow, as a vendor, the challenge is to make these shaders work for the newbie. Preferably without having to give them lots of documentation to read. Having the ability in the shaders to control turning GC on and off is a huge plus.

   Because of the realism of these kinds of shaders, when I model the geometry I now take a lot of time defining my material zones. All of my new products have plenty of material zones so I can mix these shaders, eliminate seams and lay out designs ahead of time. This way i can mix latex, leather,lace,transmapped laces and now suede and have it look great.

  I would be interested in knowing how others are dealing with the new 'shader evolution' in their design process.
cheerio
lululee
  

good job guys. i bow down to you.