I think you need to decrease the contrast of your roughness map- try putting a Map Range node in between the texture and the roughness input, and playing around with the To Min and To Max values. You’ll probably want to turn the To Max value down
By giving a quick look at the tutorial what you get is quite close to what they have at the end of the tutorial.
Looks like they improved it for the render at the beginning.
What you can do is to rework the textures in photoshop / krita. Load the texture files and use it as a basis. Then use a flat blue color or a slight gradient and redraw the white grid on top of it.
Something I would add: you could pass your color texture through a mixRGB node and mix it with a solid blue color to flatten the details a bit.
Also, a big difference is the amount of reflection. If I recall correctly, solar panels are usually encased in glass, so you might try using clearcoat (assuming you are using a principled shader).
I reworked the texture and it looks similar to the reference image. my only problem is the glass layer of the texture, in the reference image. Do you have any idea how to get this done?
If you’re using the principled BSDF you can add a clearcoat layer, with very low roughness.
But you’ll have to rework the shader a bit, because water drops then should be on the clearcoat .
clearcot doesnt give me that extra glass “layer” over the texture like on the reference, but it looks more realistic with. Thank you! Will turn down the opacity of the solar texture a bit. maybe this will bring me closer to the reference. But clearcot was defenitely an upgrade!
Hum, clearcoat is a reflexive , thin layer on top of the material, but yeah it has no thickness.
You may try to remove the clearcoat and model a real glass with a glass material on top of the panel.
Could work better, if you have time to test it that may worth to try !
basically there are a bunch of nodes combined to create the waterdrops (not relevant). All together combined in a principled bsdf (bump, rougness, metall nodes), no I need a solution to combine the principled bsdf with my glass shader, which is a simple mix shader out of a transparent and glass bsdf. Do you have any idea?
you can take the normal and roughness values plugged into the principled , and plug that into the glass BSDF.
And then get rid of the principled and plug the mix shader into the output node.
It’s worth trying to plug the glass bsdf right into the output too.
you´re a hero! and you were right, glass on the top doesnt make a huge difference but just gives it this touch more realism (especially when zooming in), awesome!
Will play with my lights to get more realism out of my render. Big thanks for your help!!
