Proposed Material Naming Standard

Looking at these SSS tests is amazing. The latest reminded me of tan vinyl. or Mat: Plastic.vinyl.fauxleather.tan, which got me thinking…

We are really going to have to start a serious naming discussion for all these materials; this SSS opens up a whole new dimension in materials. We have moved way beyond plastic, glass, wood, etc. I propose that we adopt a nodal naming structure, similar to the genus-species naming system.

Top root: Skin, Fruit,Plastic,Wax,Emulsified,…

And the tree down is root-specific from there:
Skin.Caucasian.Sunburned, Skin.Negro.African, Skin.Baby.Butt (jk)

Fruit.Strawberries.Ripe, or Fruit.Grape.Wine-Vitus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape)

Wax.Candle.Pink,

Emulsified.Chocolate.Dark, or Emulsified.Soap.IvoryitFloats

thoughts?

I think you would have to put it in a lot of textbooks and in at least one good program (built in) before it would catch on, if it ever would. Sounds like a good idea though.

well, I was thinking more of an informal standard for communicating among ourselves, and for some sanity in documenting our materials. Not as some dictatorial standard, but as a guide in how to name these things. And, as we build libraries of these, and share material libraries, to have some kind of hierarchical tree to select from.

Standards.Naming-conventions.Military:Color-OliveDrab:Quantity-1:Unit-Each.

I saw a paint colour once. It was called ‘colleen green’, and it put me off the whole concept of named materials. :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, this sounds like one of those ideas that everyone says is really good, but which nobody ever really catches on to doing.

Actually, I really think that whatever the material is called, I’m going to look at it anyway and decide for myself. Besides, my system only shows the first 14 or so characters of the material name, so we would need to put the really significant name part up front, but first we’d have to decide which is the significant name part: skin? or frecked? or caucasian? or sunburned? I certainly wouldn’t want to chair that meeting :spin:

Or we could use acronyms, like M.SK.H-N.C.Y.M-Y.F.F

EDIT: By the way, no malice intended. I’m just kidding around. :stuck_out_tongue:

You’re right Orinoco, the limit is 19 chars for a material name. So, sorry BlackBoe, your acronym idea is 20 and would not fit, resulting AT (acronymn truncation). :slight_smile:

Well, you all raise good points. nvm.

So, perhaps, going a step furthor how many permutations can you have with 20 letters/numbers?

That would lead to an indexed system, in a text file, in blender and the wiki. Maybe?

Once it was complete, it would just need updating and not take so much time to maintain.

well, half of me says to take it up seriously, if we are ever going to get to decent useable shared materials libary thing, which is holding us back. Look at 3DSmax, etc heck even DAZ comes with a pre-loaded and pre-defined material set, and not just medium-gray on the Add New. The Library script, if it is fixed by now, would make a great interface to a subdirectory where these are stored. But organizing it would be a be-ach.

The other half says why bother let everyone figure it out on their own time to take a nap you old fart who needs help anyway let someone else do it and what is so wrong with re-inventing the wheel over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again anyway it’s good experience maybe i should use some punctuation.

In answer to your question, an infinite number; practically speaking you could get three nodes, like glass.frosted.gr where gr is an ISO standard color abbreviation. English, of course :wink: A possible starting set of Top level Nodes seem to be, in light of old, sss, and now caustics:

Flat, Gloss, Satin (no SSS etc-old skool)

Plastic. Glass, Skin, Metal, Wood, Stone, Paper, Emulsion, … (new skool)

So, for example, <and these would all need to be defined,> Skin is the covering of an organic thing, like a fruit or a human or a cat. So you have skin.grape.rd, or skin.human.tn, skin.apple.yl (for the golden delicious apple, not the green tart skin.apple.gr or red delicious skin.apple.rd), and of course a very special and hotly debated skin.suzzanne.??.

I’m not suggesting we define the world here, or be the most authoritative source, but trying to guide people in creating these materials, and them getting good results with nothing to start with, is sorta unreasonable. Also, asking every good post to post their settings, well, there’s about a hundred settings that now go into a material, so it would be easier to say it is X plus these tweaks, rather than Click Add New. RGB is…Shader is toon…spec is Oren, settings are .3,.4,.5, respectively. Disable ior, but an emit of .02, and …

If you do a render of sunburned skin, isn’t it kind of obvious? If it looks real enough, you shouldn’t have to notify people what it is…
Am I missing something here?