I know that there’s a lot of tutorials out there on materials and texturing in Blender, but I can’t find much info on a relatively simple detail.
When setting up basic materials in Blender (2.63 is my version atm), I know how to change diffuse and specular intensity and hardness, but I cannot find much info on what’s recommended settings for different materials like wood, thatch, stone etc. Does anyone have any links to info or hints on this?
I know the intensities and hardness needs to go down for softer textures, but how far down, for thatch for instance? And wood?
It all depends on the material you are trying to recreate. For example wood. You could have a highly polished wood surface that would need a low roughness since the reflections would be almost mirror like. Alternatively you could have rough sawn timber that has a very high roughness, or even no glossy at all (i.e. is just made up of a textured diffuse material). Same goes for metal - polished metal looks very different to brushed metal and you would have to use different techniques to recreate each of them.
The simple answer is - there is no simple answer. You either need to experiment, go onto a site like blendswap and download some materials to see what others have done, look for some material tutorials (like BlenderGuru’s anisotropic material tutorial) - or search these forums for node setups etc - there are a few wood materials floating around on here.
Experiment. Save your renders along with the settings used to create them, and don’t be afraid to try ridiculously high or low settings, sometimes you will be pleasantly surprised by the result. Remember, we are not modelling reality, we are modelling an illusion of reality. Adjust your spec and hardness so the image looks good.
Good points on different types of wood and metal there, Moony, thanks for your explanation.
With time I’’ download other people’s files from Blendswap and see what’s being used, but for now I’ll definetively start experimenting. I’ve been dragging the specular intensity down towards 0 for “rough wood”, plus setting the hardness to around 20 so far. I’ll keep an eye out for what looks best, alternatively at least not chaoticly wrong.