Blender Material Preview

Hi…

Finally i think i can show a little thing i’ve been working on for the past weeks…

Is nothing awesome but i think it can be really useful for a lot of cases…

Is a Material Preview Scene, it has everything necessary, you can tests reflections, refractions, raytracer depth, GI, caustics, it even has SSS bar and bubbles, everything has been studied carefully to be as correct as possible and to give the user a good test scene for realistic materials and much more than that…

Because of the way i created the scene, it can be used with practically any render engine you want, even Blender Internal: actually THAT was the renderer i intended to test with this scene.

Is not finished yet, but is almost done, give me another week to finish last details and i’ll post it in case anyone wants to use it… Is not perfect but it works really well and the best of all, is Blender made, with Blender Logo (with correct proportions and everything) :stuck_out_tongue:

In the tests i’ve made, the scene not only works well for testing materials, it also tests a lot of a renderer’s capabilities like OSA sampling, Memory management, raytracer speed and efficiency, so it wouldn’t only be useful for material showing and sharing like the Blender material repository, it would be a good test scene for any Blender render/material/feature developed, like Farsthary’s Raycaster Volumetric rendering, Ypoissant’s SAH-BVH works on the new raytracer, UncleZeif’s Lightcuts… and so on.

This are some little tests i’ve made with the scene, hopefully in a week i’ll post a couple more tests with some mapping tests and i’ll try to create a mini documentation file if anyone wants to use it.

Gold material test
http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/1240/prueba102ns3.jpg

Glass material test (it doesn’t look great because of Blender’s problem with AO and transparent shadows, and of course, maybe some caustics would be cool)
http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/4256/prueba132wn2.jpg

Realistic SSS test (this render took 3 DAYS to render… Blender’s raytracer seriously needs some work!)
http://img76.imageshack.us/img76/9040/prueba142fg5.jpg

Maybe this scene could be a feature built into Blender to test materials?

The SSS render shouldn’t take 3 days if you use the SSS settings

Looking great! Thanks for the effort. I know that I will find it useful.

Hey, this looks pretty cool. Looking forward to the blend!

Hi CD… I didn’t only used SSS for that test, i used glossy refractions and reflections to accomplish a realistic behavior.

Well it looks nice! Sort of like sea glass…

A little update… Nothing fancy here, just a couple of tests with mapping…

Everything seems to work fine, i even experimented with some displacement, i had to raise subdivisions to 4 and face count was more than 1.8M but it rendered smooth wothout problems :)… probably even better results could be achieved with Kai Kostack’s Adaptive Subdivision script

Wood material test
http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/161/prueba152jv5.jpg

Bricks material test (with some displacement)
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/3865/prueba172uy4.jpg

Today i’ll start the mini documentation of the scene, hopefully in a couple of days finally i’ll be able to post the .blend :slight_smile:

That wood looks smashing :slight_smile:

However, the bricks, not so much… I know it is’nt your fault tho, Blender’s displacement could use some work… All in good time!

If you want to bother though, you could paint up/post pro the heck out of your brick texture, and create your own displacement map. It’d be more work, but you’d get much more realistic results.

i think you should email it to : http://www.blender-materials.org/
it would be an awesome setup for this website :slight_smile:
great work :smiley:

Completely agree, Blender’s displacement need some serious work, is a headache :mad:

Thanks, that’s one of the ideas, :slight_smile:

Well, if you use the same brick texture like in this case you won’t get the desired, realistic effect keeping in mind that the displacement is based on the equivalent grayscale values. Try using a separate texture for the displacement.

Hi recicledTrash… of course i used a custom created map based on grayscale values! otherwise it would be impossible in this case to have a good displacement…

But i had to try a lot of times to get the effect, i had to blur a lot the map and change the value of displacement everytime i changed the blur!.. in miy experiences with Max, this is a lot easier and intuitive.

Anybody know of any other way to get bubbles in transparent fluid or glass?

I love the design of the object… very cool… how did you model it… plus nice textures you’ve got rendering there…

Thanks kirado, i modeled the object from an icosphere…

Textures and material setup are the purpose of the scene :slight_smile:

Oh, and i’m working on a nice update of the scene, nothing very exiting, just some topology fixes and stuff like that… in a couple of weeks i’ll post the news and the files.

Looks very nice for testing materials. For a while I’ve been thinking it would be nice a couple of scenes more to preview materials. And the other day when Blendernation posted this PDF where Suzanne appears, I did like the test mesh for fluids (page 8), and is also nice the mesh for fabrics (page 13) although it could be better with a freezed Blender cloth simulation.

.

I saw that pdf and the fluids scene is very cool… the fabrics one not so much…

Personally i don’t use many scenes for material testing, in general, this scene could be used to test fluids and fabrics materials too (that’s the reason for bubbles and the SSS-bar)… but who knows, in the future maybe i could create a nice fluids material test scene and a cloth one.

I agree that the raytracer is pretty slow - but they are aware of it.
it is just not that easy to clean up.

I was told by one dev that they are looking into it soon.

yep, that’s right cekuhnen… i’m awared about raytracer works…i’m up to date with blender news and very thankful for developers work :slight_smile:

Wouldn’t it be useful if the model was unwrapped, ready to be UVmapped or baked?
(if it’s not already of course…)