by frankmci » Thu Oct 31, 2019 11:22 am
frankmci
Thu Oct 31, 2019 11:22 am
The Live DB can be a little flaky, but is a great resource. Some of the shaders there are far from elegantly constructed, but you can still learn a lot from dissecting them and figuring out how they work. The thumbnails can sometimes take quite a while to load, and in the mean time it seems to be dead. Also, you have to select the actual categories in the hierarchy to see their contents, not the enclosing directory. It's not exactly intuitive. So, for instance, to view the general metal materials you need to select LiveDB/Materials/Non-Organic/Metal, then wait a little for the thumbnails to load. The Pearl Metal I mentioned is actually not in Metal, but in Misc.
The Search function also only seems to work within the currently active category, and not within all sub-directories and categories within a selected directory as you would probably expect. The functionality of LiveDB is overdue for an update.
Here's a C4D scene with the shader I mentioned, in case LiveDB is still giving you trouble.
Be aware that all those Color nodes used in the LiveDB material are actually unnecessary for a shader this simple; all those values can be held by the Material node itself. Sometimes it's nice to break them out, though, for visual feedback, or for efficiency, such as here where they used a single color node to drive both the Material Roughness and the Sheen Roughness. In the screen grab, you can see they are functionally identical with and without the extra nodes.
- Attachments
-
- PearlMetal.c4d.zip
- Pearl Metal scene file
- (92.95 KiB) Downloaded 364 times
-
- Pearl Metal extra nodes
Technical Director - C4D, Maya, AE, - Washington DC