First Material Uploaded, Pebbles on wet sand/Concrete

[trutextures]

Still very new to Indigo Renderer but managed to suss out how to change the HDR sphere and added a displacement map.
It's a simple material but I hope it's realistic
Enjoy!

http://www.indigorenderer.com/materials/materials/1287

[OnoSendai]

Hi there, welcome to the forum!
The material looks good.
I'll write some more tips and give some more feedback later this evening.
Cheers,
nick

[Zom-B]

regarding displacement I can give you the following advices:


For displacement use a negative C value of half of your B!
By that you generate a "centered displacement"!
In your case every pixel that isn't pure black pushes the mesh outwards.

With having the C value negative of half B all pixels that are above 50% of grey push outwards, and every pixel under does pull inwards!

Example: you B value is 0.008 for a 8mm displacement. Set the C to be -0.004 to center the displacement!

You see the benefit of that method with higher displacement scale.

I also suggest to save Displacement & Normal Maps as 16bit PNGs for best quality, since artifacts get visible in this channels the most!
For 16bit textures usually set gamma to 1.0. if you use RGB 8bit textures for exponent, fresnel, displacement etc. the gamma is 2.2.

Regarding detail its most of the time a good advice to have less high frequency details for displacement maps, that "noise" can rough up the mesh and look bad! Its better to get the extra details via bump or normal map!

At the moment Indigo doesn't support Normal maps & Bump maps together! If a normal map is used in a material, the bump mapping gets ignored!
(I hope to see that "fixed" in the future...)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/693 ... Zom-B.pigm

[bubs]

For displacement use a negative C value of half of your B!

Did not know this! This is a great tip, the ones I've retried all look better!

[trutextures]

regarding displacement I can give you the following advices:


For displacement use a negative C value of half of your B!
By that you generate a "centered displacement"!
In your case every pixel that isn't pure black pushes the mesh outwards.

With having the C value negative of half B all pixels that are above 50% of grey push outwards, and every pixel under does pull inwards!

Example: you B value is 0.008 for a 8mm displacement. Set the C to be -0.004 to center the displacement!

You see the benefit of that method with higher displacement scale.

I also suggest to save Displacement & Normal Maps as 16bit PNGs for best quality, since artifacts get visible in this channels the most!
For 16bit textures usually set gamma to 1.0. if you use RGB 8bit textures for exponent, fresnel, displacement etc. the gamma is 2.2.

Regarding detail its most of the time a good advice to have less high frequency details for displacement maps, that "noise" can rough up the mesh and look bad! Its better to get the extra details via bump or normal map!

At the moment Indigo doesn't support Normal maps & Bump maps together! If a normal map is used in a material, the bump mapping gets ignored!
(I hope to see that "fixed" in the future...)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/693 ... Zom-B.pigm

Many thanks! I really appreciate the feedback and will be sure to follow your advice

Still learning about rendering... its more complex than people think (inc me)

[OnoSendai]

Well, great advice from Zom-B.
I was going to say that the 'b' value for displacement is very important, as it determines the height of displacement (in metres). E.g. b = 0.001 means a displacement of 1mm (for the max-valued pixels in your texture). So for pebbles you probably want a slightly larger displacement.

Also, I would prefer that you don't change the environment map, or the lighting, or tonemapping settings in general when making a preview image for the material database. This is so all the lighting situations are the same, which means it's easier for users to compare the colours of materials at a glance.

Looking forward to more materials!