noob question

[dfro]

I just found Indigo a few days ago, and I am study hard to get rendering with it. I am running it in Linux with Blender/Blendigo.

I tried Indigo 1.0.9, but I had problems with the renders freezing, so I switched to Indigo 1.1.5/Blendigo 1.1.5.

I am having an issue, which I cannot seem to figure out.

When I try to preview materials, I only get them in black and white.
Is that normal or am I missing something? I have selected the material and pressed the 'conv' button. The RGB sliders in Blendigo show the right color, but there is no color in the preview render. I see that Indigo looks up a previewmats.xml file and the <rgb> is set to 0.8 0.8 0.8.

Previews using the .nk files are working and showing in color, though.

Thanks for any ideas,
dfro

[dfro]

After more experimentation, I realize that all of the materials are previewing in color except "SPECULAR = transparent + sss". Any ideas?

Thanks,

dfro

[Apollux]

Try upping the gain of the specular materials, so that they show some color.

[dfro]

Apollux,

I tried moving the gain under 'Absorbtion type' if that is what you are talking about - but no change.

When I do a test render of a simple scene (i.e. blender's default cube), the colors in the transparent material are passed to the scene. No matter what settings I change in blender/blendigo, the preview scenes made with the "SPECULAR = transparency + sss" material render only in black and white. IMHNO (In my humble noob opinion), I think that this might be a little bug in the blendigo script. The <rgb> value is not being passed to the preview scene before being rendered.

It's not a big deal. I can just make a sphere or cube in blender and render it to see what the material will look like.

I am very happy with my first attempts at rendering a few scenes that are more complicated. I am hooked on unbiased rendering!

Thanks,
dfro

[zsouthboy]

dfro:
Many of us have done a lot of complicated specular materials using Blendigo - you simply are not changing the correct parameters, likely.

Please post your .blend and a screenshot of your output.

[dfro]

zsouthboy,

Thanks for the reply. I got it working. The problem was that I was using the arrows on the Blendigo "Absorp. Type: RGB" Gain setting. It steps in increments of 100. At 0.00 there is no color imparted to the transparent material, so the scene is black and white. Press the right arrow once and the Gain goes to the 100.00 setting, at which point all light is absorbed and the material is pitch black (with a tiny hint of color in the base of the MatDB), and again the scene is black and white. Values 200-1000 give you pitch black material just like 100, which makes me wonder why the range is so large. Maybe an increment/decrement of 1 per click would help in not throwing the noobs off.

I will study the material files in dougal2's Indigo Material Database, to get a good sense of how the settings change the look of transparent and semi-transparent materials. I like how he posted the xml of each material with its render.

Thanks,
dfro