OTOY Forums

Hi there!

Here I'm trying to create some metals and I would like some input from more experienced users.
I'm not new to CG, but I'm new to unbiased physically correct renderers. My crappy hardware wasn't allowing me to experiment much with those, until Octane came around

So, I went to create a copper material with oxidation flecks. Most metals exhibit colored reflections, so I had to create a RGB texture for the specular channel. The software I'm used to from my previous experiences, has basically two parameters for specularity: specular color and specular intensity, that are controlled separately. In Octane there's only a 'specular' slot, so how is the needed info extracted from the texture? I guess that the tex color saturation controls the tint of the reflection and the tex is converted to BW for intensity?

Here are the textures I used in this example.



The diffuse and normal are self-explanatory. The specular tex is tinted pink to give more pinkish reflections instead of orange, and I desaturated the oxidation spots to have a neutral (noncolored) reflection there and darkened them to lower the power of reflection. Does this sound logical?



Next I mixed the specular node with a RGB color to further control the tint of the reflection inside Octane. Don't mind the second pot, it's there just for company.

So, it would be nice if other users would chip in their tips on metal creation, or materials in general, so that newcomers (like me) could learn from them. There were some pleas for tutorials lately, so we could use this thread to gather tips and then extract a tutorial out of it? Anyway if you have the time and will, feel free to use the attached scene, modify it and then post your results and explanation here. Or add your own samples.



Just for the reference, here's a shot of this scene, that I think is kinda nice (its of lower quality because I didn't let it render long, but anyway)

would you mind sharing this scene ?
(OBJ + textures), i really love the floor plane and it's texture, it's much better than our current material ball floorplane grid texture.

if you don't want to share it publically, you could mail it to us, contact details are on the about us page...

Radiance

The scene is already attached above the last picture, with textures and everything

One of the points of this thread is to share knowledge of creating materials, with appropriate files included, if possible.

Just note, that the floor texture has those arrows with '1BU' on it - which are meant to give object scale reference in Blender Units. I can remove those and post the texture without

Thanks, it's always good to see how others are working with Octane

cheers,
A

Hi matej, thank you very much for this excellent resource to learn from!

No problem.
This thread didn't evolve in what I hoped, but at least is useful to someone

excellent. The only thing I would say is that things made of copper do not normally use a plating technique. The object would be solid copper.

Matej I'm just learning Octane ("and CG in general") and this is very helpful to read. I hope to see more people with your kind of attitude here.

I have to agree with radiance I'm gonna use your floor plane. BU = Blender Unit?

Thanks again
- Josh Chernoff aka PolygonPusher

Cool.
BU = Blender unit, yes, but you must also know the scale factor you used to export, to get the picture how big is the object in Octane world.