hello guys, so I’ve noticed from lurking on the forum for the last few months that there’s a lot of cool posts where someone makes a really awesome blender material and shares it with everyone every a couple of weeks or even days, so i thought what if we combined all those materials into a community pack that gets updated every a couple of months? with credit to the original authors and their permission of course, just like List of addons that work with 2.8 post but with materials and a convenient single click download where you get the community pack with over 100 materials or more. I know there’s hundreds of other sites that are focused on sharing materials and categorizing them but I’m not talking about something like that, I’m suggesting a single solid pack with essential materials that the community can work together to perfect, not a huge library with thousands of random materials, thanks for reading and I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts.
Oh and it should be procedural materials only, to save on size and not have to deal with annoying textures and resolutions etc
That sound like a good idea, but there is one important thing I want to mention.
Probably you all have material packs already and noticed when importing them into your scene, the materials need to be tweaked, especially the albedo value which if often way to high.
Very urgent, for those who offer material- or shader-packs,is that the albedo values needs to be plausible. So how do you do that. Here it goes:
You need some reference which can be a lot of things, like having an HDRI, but the best bet is to have a grey card in your scene. That is a diffuse material that has the value for each RGB value: 0.18. (R: 0.18, G: 0.18, B: 0.18). Then put the grey card close to the object and turn on False Color. Set the strength or exposure so, that the grey card gets grey. Then adjust the albedo values when designing your material.
If someone who makes materials does that, then there is consistency. I see way to much wood texture for example that looks like snow, and sometimes like ash. I am not kidding. Here this example below is a comparison of shader done the way as described here above, and shaders I bought:
Or if you don’t agree with the above workflow, then please just take care at least of the albedo values the way you think is best. For examples or more info, check this link
Some additional notes:
- I think best is to make a difference between EEVEE materials/shader and Cycles materials/shaders.
- When designing shaders, the dynamic range of the HDRI might be important (in case you use HDRI).
- For EEVEE, I think the best bet is to have a good lighting setup instead of HDRI and bake properly plus proper render settings.
Thanks for the informative reply, I don’t know much about materials so i appreciate people like you who can help us perfect the pack from a technical standpoint
Yes indeed. Good 'ol 18% medium gray shooting reference card… you need that if you shoot something you then send to someone else… aka color correction…
Also if anyone wants to volunteer or help with setting up anything go ahead because i honestly have no idea where to begin, should I start going around the forum collecting materials and asking for permission from the authors or do i wait for people to submit it themselves?
hmm so i discovered this is a huge undertaking and there’s a lot of variables that i didn’t even think of, so in the meantime I’ll post some of my favorite materials that i found here and other texture sites that i found throughout the period I was learning blender, most of you might already know those sites and materials but this might be useful for someone