Procedural Wood

The next entry in this series is a much improved version of my procedural wood, which now looks like

Procedural Rust

The first entry in this Surface Knowledge series will be the now fully procedural metal rust materia

Surface Knowledge

I’ve spent the last weeks refining the materials I showcased in my previous post and the results l

 

Procedural Wood

May 8, 2012 in Surface Knowledge

The next entry in this series is a much improved version of my procedural wood, which now looks like this:

The node setup is also a bit more complex than before:

And here is a link to the blend file for those interested in trying out this material:

http://www.minimaexpresion.es/blend/Procedural Wood_1.2.blend

To get a better look at the possibilities of this new material, here is render of a model I made precisely to showcase this material:

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more Surface Knowledge. ;)

Update v1.1: I have made some adjustments to the material so finer grain looks more diffuse and less solid. I also made a little tweak to the way grain direction behaves. All images in this post have been rerendered with version 1.1 of my wood material.

Update v1.2: More adjustments for this material. This time I have created an additional scale controller for the fine grain and another one to control the displacement intensity.Esta vez he añadido un controlador adicional para la escala de las vetas más finas y otro para controlar la intensidad del efecto bump mapping. All images in this post have been rerendered with version 1.2 of my wood material.

Procedural Rust

May 7, 2012 in Surface Knowledge

The first entry in this Surface Knowledge series will be the now fully procedural metal rust material, which currently looks like this:

  • Minimum rust:

  • Medium rust:

  • Maximun rust:

The node setup is a large and complex one, so I will post it here and answer any possible questions in the comments section:

I will point out, though, that the topmost ColorRamp node is the one governing the amount of rust in the material, so play with it to set the rust to your content.

Also depending on your scene and model you may want to adjust the scale value in the rust node group.

Here is a link to the blend file for those who want to try the material themselves (I will probably do further improvements to it in the future, hence the versioning in the name). You can use it freely, but if you mention me or this site, I’d be more than happy. ;)

http://www.minimaexpresion.es/blend/Procedural_Rust_1.1.blend

Lastly, in order to showcase this new material and give an impression of the actual possibilities of the current version, I modelled this:

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more Surface Knowledge. ;)

Update v1.1: I have made a few minor adjustments to this material. Mainly removal of unused nodes and simplification of the .blend file for a less hardware demanding render. The metal has also been adjusted so it looks less glossy.

The v1.1 .blend file should look like this when rendered:

Surface Knowledge

May 6, 2012 in Surface Knowledge

I’ve spent the last weeks refining the materials I showcased in my previous post and the results look really promising. Progress has been huge in the case of rusty metal, since now this material is fully procedural and doesn’t rely on any external texture.

Fully procedural materials offer the advantages of independence from external tools, flexibility and lower memory footprint than high resolution image textures at the cost of longer render times. For these reasons I’ve decided to create a section in this blog entirely dedicated to the development and refinement of fully procedural materials in Cycles, and it will be aptly titled “Surface Knowledge”.

You are free to comment or make suggestions concerning any of the entries in this section.

A study in Cycles materials

April 23, 2012 in Blender - 3D Art

Before getting on with my pending projects I decided to keep exploring the basic aspects of Blender to gain a better control and understanding of it. I spent last week experimenting with the creation of new materials in Cycles.

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Deep in the Caribbean

April 12, 2012 in Blender - Animation

I took some time off my present project to do some experimenting with the ocean simulator in Blender. I also seized the chance to try a few things with the procedural sky texture in Cycles, which offers great possibilities for getting a nice looking sky without having to resort to real sky photographs. While doing my first tests, it occurred to me that it would be nice do a little homage to one of my favourite videogame sagas.

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Getting my hands dirty

April 3, 2012 in Blender - 3D Art

I finally decided to get my hands dirty creating and mapping textures into my ship model. It’s been a slow and complicated task, and it I haven’t finished yet, but the model is starting to look nice.

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Exploring the nebula

March 15, 2012 in Blender - 3D Art

I’ve kept working on the ship in my previous entry, though I have to admit that up until now I have been focusing more on the surrounding scene than on the ship itself. I had this idea to place it in the middle of an asteroid field deep inside a nebula. For that I wanted to use a background inspired by the ones in Homeworld. I think the overall result is quite pleasing, as can be seen below.

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To infinity and beyond…

February 29, 2012 in Blender - 3D Art

After so many experiments and simulations I decided that it was time to start working on my object modelling skills, and since the best way to enjoy your learning is by modelling something you like, I chose to attempt modelling a space ship.
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Today’s header at Blendernation

February 21, 2012 in Blender - 3D Art

Blendernation, the most important site for Blender related news, really made my day by selecting one of my renders for today’s header. Thanks a lot, Bart. :)

Selected render

And yet it moves…

February 15, 2012 in Blender - Animation

After so many fluid simulations and having experimented in the past with bullet physics and the fracture script, I went ahead and created this animation combining all of them.

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