Applying Colors to Octane Textures in Lightwave 3D

[djh0987]

First and foremost Lightwave and Octane is amazing. The possibilities are endless once you know how to use all of the tools. Things are starting to click thanks to this community.

I'm hoping to get some help on projecting the environment's color on objects. I'm also trying to get a better understanding on how to apply color gradients to surface textures.

I'm working through a Simply Lightwave tutorial and now I'm at the texturing and scene set up phase. Here's a look at my current scene set up

.

In the tutorial, he applies a procedural turbulence bump map to the cross behind the skull and then makes adjustments to the diffusion, specularity and glossiness channels. From there, he applies a procedural dented texture to the diffusion channel and the object maintains the environment's color. When I try to replicate this through Octane, I get very different results. So, I'm turning to the LW Octane community for some guidance .

Would someone be able to walk me through the steps on getting a similar texture and color on the cross as seen in this image

?

Thanks so much for all of your help!

[gordonrobb]

I'm guessing the tutorial you're following is not an Octane one? Octane materials are totally different.

[juanjgon]

Yes, this is the main problem, the Octane nodes are not the same, and even the workflow for shading is different. Can you please post a screen grab of the node tree that this tutorial is using to shade the cross object? This could help to try to build something similar with Octane

-Juanjo

[djh0987]

Yes, that's definitely the problem. I've attempted to recreate a similar effect using Octane but I can't seem to bring out the right blend of textures and colors. The tutorial uses the lw surface editor panel instead of nodes. This is also another limitation in recreating the effect on my own. Here's a screenshot of my cross node tree along with an updated IPR render. I'll continue tweaking the materials, texture colors and Octane lights but any suggestions this community can provide would be very helpful.

[juanjgon]

It looks good, but perhaps the problem is that you should use more resolution in the texture nodes. If you want to send to me the scene ([email protected]), I could play with it here to try to get better materials in the cross object

-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

Attached you have a test material preset for the cross object ... I think that the main problem was the scale of the textures.

-Juanjo

[djh0987]

This is long overdue but here's an update. Using Juanjo's node tree as a guide I was able to get the whole scene textured. There's still a lot that could be done to improve the scene but being my first full scene (modeling > texturing > rendering) I'm pleased with how it turned out. I've since moved on to other projects and I'll probably revisit this again somewhere down the line.

Here are pictures of the final render along with some screenshots for some of the node trees. I learned a lot and I hope others can learn from this as well.

Thanks, Juanjo and the entire Lightwave and Octane community.