xProcedural Workflow

I’ve been working for a couple month a new procedural shading workflow that adds another layer of abstraction when it comes to making PBR shaders. The idea is to build a material more simply in stages: mix a wood and paint shader with the sum of scratch and grunge nodes and add a dirt shader to make a dirty park bench.


CURRENT STATUS


Current Shader: SmokySphere
Current Image:

Tutorial Included


Wood Shader Evolution

v1

v3 w/ Clearcoat


v4 w/AddKnots


My main concern with the current wood is the quality of the knots and the bump.

looks like a good start.in the pic with the knots,i think thats to much knots on that piece of wood,if this came from a usely tree.for the bumpmap i woult try negative bumpmaping to bump inwarts.

I corrected the knots and tweaked some parameters. This is the wood shader for now–until I figure out how to make a realistic moss shader.



I think the knots are too round.

I thought that it was a bullet hole.

Maybe add a few subtler knots? (ones that cause loops in the grain, but not black spots). Also, consider adding anisotropy. It looks really good on wood! (Demonstrated on knotted wood, my own procedural version)


I added a subtle knot generator to the AddKnots group and updated the Pattern-Grain slider so that it is like the ‘Mix’ on a Glare node: from -1 to 0, the strength of grain increases and from 0 to 1 the strength of the general wood texture decreases. This allows making woods that don’t have the common rings—like balsa—and to have varying strengths of both grain and pattern.

Here it is with only grain:


I also decided to do a render without the bump-map and with a roughness of near 0 to test the feasibility of using this shader in a polished wood scenario (like in a dashboard or fancy lamp).


Too shiny? Is something off here?

Wow, the last one looks very good!

Yeah, the last one looks like a realistic lacquered wood. I really like your progress so far.

Testing compatibility with the general workflow:


Wood + AddDirt + AddDust


Thoughts on either wood or AddDirt?

Since wood in cabinetry and furnishings is rarely one-piece—how to you find a tree that large anyway?—I made a nodegroup that can tile any texture with any size in 3 dimensions.


X, Y, and Z are how long the repeated portion should be.

In all of my textures/shaders—except for the one that generates a galaxy—the Z-axis can be used as a seed, and that is how this nodegroup prevents exact repetition:


Here it is on a (rotated) default cube.

And another complex layer test:

Wood + Paint + Dirt


Something definitely seems off…
Is the paint too shiny, or not enough?
Or maybe the bump too strong?

I reduced the bump on the wood, the thickness of the paint, and strengthened the strength of wood pattern.
I also changed the paint color to freshen things up.


streak = 0


streak = 0.85

The streak parameter refers to the streakiness of the dirt. Increasing it leans more towards dirt that is rubbed often—or at least that’s the idea.

(And if it gets anyone more interested, I am planning to sell the whole shader pack/workflow when its done. I’ve got a lot more shaders to critique, but want to perfect this set first.)

Its been a while since my last post, and I’ve decided to start organizing my shading workflow library. I just realized how large it is:


I’ve also got a new shader to critique:



These are just cubes with a volumetric material and a point lamp in the center.

1 Like

Wood + Paint + Dirt , that looks amazing.

Must say your node set up isent exacly : Diffuse- glossy- mix shader :stuck_out_tongue:

good work

Thanks,

Are the Galaxy shaders lacking anything? Anything off with the colors, or transmission, or anything?

Colorful images of galaxies and nebulae are produced by exagerating the hues of gases and elements in the image, so they aren’t really all that uniform. https://astroquizzical.com/astroquizzical/are-all-nebulaegalaxy-photos-false-colour-even

Here’s a good explanation of false and exaggerated color in astronomical images https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24895/what-do-the-colors-in-false-color-images-represent/24896
Also bear in mind that galaxies have a lot of dense gaseous regions that occlude light making dark regions like this

Still working on new galaxy shader. I’ve got the dense clouds working, I think.




(4 samples)

Any suggestions?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, got a little busy with other things. I decided to pause work on the rebuilt galaxy shader because it was taking so long, though I did create this cool thing:


Anyway, I’ve been working on a carpaint shader, and I must say I’m pretty happy with where it is. Any critique? Anything missing?


Here it is in different colors on the ol’ shader ball.

And the node