Eyeballs are your best friend here.
Everybody who is calling for "physically based" magic tables: It would be a lot of work to integrate nk-tables into Octane for absolutely no benefit. They hardly look any better than manually set up materials using a falloff and matching colors. The major disadvantage of them is that they give you absolutely no flexibility and in the case of gold you would need dozens of different look up tables, because there are so many variations out there.
We should rather focus more on improving the live material database.
I absolutely agree with you! For example Reolands Gold is very good and me as a goldsmith, who allways has different types of gold in front of himselft, has a good eye for this material. But its hard for me to work with leather, glass and so on. Reolands gold is good, because the physics of the gold is correct, but it is too red. It nearly looks like polished copper or at least red gold. If you want yellow gold you have to desaturate reolands material and also set the roughness lower. For Whitegold the roughness needs to be set higher and so on. So i just have to change the "roughness" and the colour of it and it fits perfectly, but you HAVE TO KNOW HOW IT LOOKS IN THE REALITY, what sometimes is for a unknown user pretty hard and should not be the users only option. Also one thing to mention here is that gold and gemstones ONLY look good if you set up the light correctly. You can have the best gold and best diamond, but if the light is set up wrong, the materials look very strange/wrong.
What i would want is a base of "physically" correct precious metals, gemstones like sapphire, ruby, diamond, glass, and so on, where i as a user can be sure that the material is RIGHT as it is and it is my work to make it look real via the light setup and other things. If i would have the basic of a correct material, the rest of the work is very simple. Please my friends, this would be SOOOOO helpful in the Octane Workflow!
As i allready said. I am a Goldsmith and i hold my jewelry beside my monitor to compare if the materials look the same way. Colour, reflection and so on.
If you guys are interrested, we could connect and i can help you to set up this database, cause i have here any Stone, Material you can imagine - platinum, whitegold, red gold, greengold, yellow gold, copper. So if you want to, we can do that. Just PM me or contact me and LETS GO!
Thanks in advance Chris!
