Major problem with darker colours and environments.

[gordonrobb]

OK, I'm haveing a few major issues with getting fairly dark, slightly glossy materials.

In the following image, I'm trying to recreate the armour. Just focus on the colour at the moment.

My problem is that whenever I'm trying to do a really dark surface (with slight gloss, not very glossy) when I get to the darker colours I'm at almost no lumisoity, and the difference between rgb 3,3,3 and 4,4,4 is big. In the standalone, I can at these dark levels really easily. but in the plugin it's a major nightmare. I don't know if it's connected, but I have the same probem with bump maps. I make them float images, but to get a realistic level of bump (in something that may have been 50% when used in LW texturing), I have to put it all the way down to .05 and little movements make big differences.

I have checked, and my CS is disabled. My imager is at 1.0 gama, and I'm using one of the agfa curves. It's driving me nuts.

My other probem is the difference between Daylight and HDR.

The following is daylight (default settings)

Where as this is a nice sunny HDR image

Where am I going wrong folks?

[gordonrobb]

By the way, this where I've gotten with the armour. I think it's getting there

[juanjgon]

If you need to fine tune a color setting beyond the integer resolution (from 0 to 255) of the default LW color picker, you can use the gausian spectrum node, who works in floating point, or you can use a float texture to multiply your RGB color with a floating value. Internally all colors are floating point values.

About your HDRI lighting, you have a power parameter in the textureEnvironment node to increase the HDRI lighting.

-Juanjo

[gordonrobb]

Yeh, thanks that helped.

Can you point me in the direction of somewhere that will explain exactly want the mix and multiply texture nodes are doing? The help just says their are mixing and multiplying . I'm struggling to fupigure how to do some thing that are realy easy in LW.

how do I add one texture map to another for example. Sme guidance would be great.

[gordonrobb]

I got it better looking (dark wise) thanks.

However, I'm losing the will to live with these mixing textures.

I have a spec map I like. Using dirt node. Looks great.

I also have a scratch map, that if I apply, looks great.

I want to have both. I'm thinking that if I use multiply, the white bits will stay white and the dark bits will stay dark, so they should look great. Nope. The whole thing looks less specular, and you can't even see the scratches. Aaaagh!

[gordonrobb]

Anyone?

[juanjgon]

I think that you should use the mix nodes, the mix textures if you only want to mix texture maps or procedurals, or the mix materials if you have two or more materials (for example one diffuse and one glossy).

Multiply textures is not a great way to mix maps or procedurals, I think.

-Juanjo

[gordonrobb]

I'm looking for some specifics on how it works though.

What I'm going to do is open a thread that's specifically about textures and how to mix them. It'll make more sense, and I can post some pics etc.

Thanks.

G