I have been doing some rendering out of my brushed metal plate and its been going well.
Suddenly the brushed metal texture is not rendering.
The rest of the objects in the scene look fine.
I went back to a previous Blender file with the same brushed metal texture, a file where I know for certain it rendered the texture great, but when I try and render that out, it also fails to render texture.
Is there a global texture setting I changes somewhere ?
It’s hard to tell from your description and the image what the problem is. Looking at the node group, it appears to be a flat color with only a bit of roughness and normal, so perhaps it’s just too subtle?
I also notice the “Denoise” checkbox is checked - if your denoise settings are too high it could blur away your texture.
These are all just guesses; more detail would be helpful.
Am I not plugging in that texture in correctly? You can see the texture on the left hand side in purple.
I think I got this material from BlenderKit.
Is it possible that BlenderKit went offline or something? I thought when I chose a BlenderKit material it downloaded it.
Is there a Bump Node inside that Group Node (Node Group004) ? Or have you deleted the Bump Node and forgotten you did so?
I wouldn’t use bump/normals for the application that is suggested in OP. If it was a vinyl or underside of a pot with coarse machining pattern on it, then fine. But not for something that is brushed (visual colorization) or satin (invisible colorization but still stretched) and so on. Bump/normal alone can never cause anisotropic shading as that requires shadowing and masking which other renderers may solve using microdisplacement of cylinders to obtain.
As for the issue, it’s hard to guess without looking at a shared file with any resources packed.
We can see that you have a texture in the image viewer on the left. We cannot see that it has anything to do with your material, as the relevant nodes are likely hidden in the nodegroups.
If loading a blender file then all settings for this scene are read… only the Blender Prefernce settings are stored elsewhere…
I’m pressing alt-H in the nodes window in Shader, and I’m not uncovering any hidden nodes (unless I’m not doing the right method to show hidden nodes). I went through each node.
The nodes seem to suggest that the texture at the left hand side is not playing a role perhaps.
(@Okidoki I might try rendering on a different computer)
You have two nodegroups in your screenshot. Nodegroups hide a collection of nodes so that you can keep things nice and tidy and only have the inputs/outputs that you need. Click on the green node named “NodeGroup” and press tab to reveal the contents of the nodegroup. Press tab to exit again, and then do the same for “NodeGroup.004” One of them should have an image texture node in it, (probably NodeGroup.004) that should go out into the normal map input of the principled shader. I think NodeGroup just adjusts UVs, if the UVs are screwy enough that could also cause your issue though. There’s actually quite a number of potential places that something set up wrong in the nodegroups could be messing things up.
oh, and if you want to create your own nodegroup sometime, select multiple nodes and press ctrl+G
You’re right about nodegroup #4. I expanded it and there were a lot of nodes in there. I could not see an actual image texture surprisingly. The frustrating thing is, about a week ago, it was using the texture you see on the left hand side in earlier post. It must have in some unknown way got disconnected - how can I reconnect it?
I post this image below of the nodes in Nodegroup#4, but the image is too small to see the individual nodes. I posted below that the left, middle and right sections of the node group zoomed so all can be seen.
All nodes in group#4:
Hmmm interesting. No sign of an image texture node in there all looks procedural. Hey any chance that displacement node (on the top level outside all groups) used to be connected to the displacement on the material out? Its possible that was doing all the heavy lifting. If plugging that back in doesnt fix it, could we see inside the other nodegroup?
If theres no image texture in there, and reconnecting that displacement doesnt work, maybe the problem is outside of this material? Are there multiple materials on the object? Is it possible you accidentally applied another similar material to everything?
Another possible problem could be changed UVs on the object.
I think I found the issue - at some stage the material was changed somehow from brush metal 2 to Brushed Aluminium. And, brush metal 2 also lost its Textures in later .blend files ! : ( I used packed resources all the time too.
I wouldn’t use [bump/normals for the application that is suggested in OP… It’s hard to tell from your description and the image what the problem is.
Ouch! That looks ridiculously expensive to compute. 4D? Why? And Smooth F1? Why? 4D Smooth F1 is something I avoid religiously. Here is what I use as a starting point for brushed/satin materials:
Did you turn on some kind of denoisung? Denoising can kill the texture in the final image!
Greets
Dennis
the issue was in this post:
