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RND SPACE
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I'll be documenting some of my studies here related to Shading, Materials and Lookdev in general.
The first thing I wanted to accomplish was to create my own lookdev setup -- nothing fancy, just a simple scene where I can drop in assets and render. Lights-wise, have here a dome and two area lights. And some basic textures on the props. I'll be dropping only raw renders here on this page.
I had test my scene to make sure things were holding up.
A metallic object quickly textured in Substance Painter.
Plugged the maps to a standardsurface material, did some small tweaks and we get this
Next up was a regular clay render.
The volumetrics and atmospheric lighting effects are wild. I tested out some cinematic lighting using the same character as above. No textures, just few mesh lights.
I also tried creating some fun looking spheres (with no UVs or textures). This is all shader work driven through noise and opacity maps in Arnold. I also drove some noise through the opacity channel and SSS. The 'halo' like effect was achieved this way. Also by layering the emissive over opacity.
This is all shader work driven through vector maps. The documentation on the Arnold's site came in handy. So many values to play around with.
Procedural surface wear or damages (image below).
I have additional controls in this shader that will allow me to adjust the height of the fake disp, patterns, flow, etc., and also assign colors to it if needed.
Finger (image below). Lights - One spot light for the finger and another to splash some light on the props.
I sculpted in some details on a finger mesh to conduct more study on shaders. Applied a standardsurface and plugged in various maps on it's SSS and spec roughness to achieve these quick results. The only texture map applied on it is the displacement from Zbrush. I tried using some sheen to fake the SSS along the finger lining, and I don't like it and the surface could have more specularity/ breakup. This is a WIP and I intend to take this up a bit more further, but quite happy considering this is just an hours worth of work and no textures on it. Maybe I'll add some details and do some texturing next.
I didn't think I would take this personally. But here's the update on the detailing front. Also, things held up pretty well in Arnold. Pretty happy with this result. Also here's the complete breakdown
Created this alien egg pouch kind of a thing using shaders - on a simple sphere.
Created a similar lookdev scene setup in Houdini to play around with MaterialX and Karma
Houdini
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