I was wondering, because we have made some progress in PD Howler's PBR-capable viewer for OBJ files. Summarized in this video: https://youtu.be/G0cPLK1ur1M?si=1PlcoSislnfdOk_H

Would there be a thread specific to dealing with material props where this could be shown?

Just need some clarity changing material on obj props in what application are you looking for this information? Depending on the application materials on props can normally changed in their shading editor like Blender or in the Material room in Poser and I think Daz Studio has a similar material editor. I need more information on what you are trying to accomplish so I can better find you an answer

Lobo3433

Blender Maya & 3D Forum Moderator

Renderosity Blender 3D Facebook Page

oh I know that if I make my own models, such as in Blender, Carrara or other tools, there will be a material editing section, a shader room or whatever it's called case by case. It's of course possible to make changes there in the native app where the model came from. Or even, say for example, if a model was saved as Wavefront .obj with .mtl materials, it can be re-imported in even other apps, and materials re-edited.

That is kind of what I have in mind, since in PD Howler we are starting to have PBR material capabilities. So whether I make my own model, or import one that was acquired, I imagine there are tutorials and tips/tricks focused on just the material props and how to edit them for various effects such as turning a clay surface into marble, with some reflection, or silver, golden, rusty,... and many other looks.

Maybe there hasn't been a focus on material props regardless of the apps. I was just thinking, since many artists use more than one tool, it might help to compare notes and techniques across applications, even share resources in some cases.

I think what you're looking for, would have been in the Texturing forum before it was sent to the nether, if it was anywhere. Would have been nice if those forums could have been archived rather than . . . disappeared.

I don't think moving materials between different software gets a whole lot of attention because the scenarios where you'd be doing that most frequently would be using UVs/image-texture maps, so the information is "baked" into the image, its not very common to move "procedural" or shader-based* textures between different software packages, there's just too many differences [well, render engines technically] for that, so non-image based texturing tends to be very software dependant.

The general concepts of texturing hold true across all software packages. For example, if you're making a glass surface, you're going to want to apply a "fresnel" effect. How you apply that is going to vary from software to software, and there's usually going to be a few options that each come different with pros/cons in every software packaged. Same goes for everything else. Marble? You're going to want some sub-surface scattering on there. How you get that is going to vary from one engine to another, and there's likely to be a couple options. It comes down to learning the general concepts, and then figuring out how to apply them in your software.

Usually artists using multiple tools aren't using them for the same purpose, ie, they're not rendering in half a dozen different programs. They might be modeling in one, painting textures in another, rigging in something else, and rendering in a fourth or something.

*Some software packages/render engines do support certain shader-types, say, Render-Man type shaders for example.

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Some render engines can work with similar attributes and others you have to retweak setting to make them achieve what you want from a cartoon style render to something more realistic. PBR textures or texturing in general share some common workflows but each application is going to have it's own way of doing things even with applications like Substance Painter you at times still need to either an addon or plugin so it will export textures and PBR made in Substance Painter to export them out to Blender Maya 3Ds Max and so forth heck even Zbrush has a quirk that it exports textures upside down and you have flip them in Zbrush so they are in the right direction when importing back into your modeling software. So I do not think there is one universal way that covers how to do it all that would cover all potential softwares I think you will need to focus on the main packages you want to work with and there are tutorials on how they can work together. I feel I am failing to truly answer your question but I hope that some of the information is helpful in some way

Lobo3433

Blender Maya & 3D Forum Moderator

Renderosity Blender 3D Facebook Page

Thanks for the info, I will keep it in my mind.

Thanks for the information, I found this helpful.

Forum: 3D Modeling

Subject: Is there a thread on just materials, and editing/changing materials, not th