OTOY Forums

PAQUITO wrote:Gordonrobb.. what is a normo?

Hehe, sorry a 'Normal' person. Not someone who has CG knowledge or experience.

You mean muggles?

PAQUITO wrote:I simply use a black&white version of the texture as a specular map. One thing I notice is the index value is non zero when importing an obj file into Octane, so I lower it to zero to get more natural reflections. Maybe is that your problem.

you mean that your wood floor has got an index of zero? (like crome or mirror material)

Correct. I always use zero index, excepting for curvy surfaces, where I raise it to get some freshnel.

PAQUITO wrote:Correct. I always use zero index, excepting for curvy surfaces, where I raise it to get some freshnel.

I'll try some test with the standalone version (maybe its behaviour is different), when I set the index to zero I loose all color from the texture (that becomes like aluminium)....maybe I'm setting up something wrong

When lowering the índex to zero you should control the specularity with the texture power. Lower it until you get natural reflections, that gives me nice results.

Muggles

Can someone explain to me what the 'index' setting is doing? I had a notion that it was like an 'angle of incidence' setting. So at zero (actaully I think it's anythign less than 1) this gradient is disabled. but what is it doing after that. In standalone, it goes from 0 to 8, what does that mean? Anyone?

Basically, the higher the index, the more the reflections will distort to the silouette of the shapes, generating a freshnel effect, which is good for metals, porcelains and the like. Chrome/mirror materials work better with index on zero. Planar surfaces like glossy floors seem to work better that way (for me, at least).

The changes are subtle, but noticeables. If you want a more radical freshnel, you should move to a specular material. Here I drop samples of different indexes, and how they affect the reflections, from the minimum to the maximum. The bottom image show how index affects more subtly from a value higher that 1, which almost negates reflections (excepting for a very very extreme freshnel) to some higher values, which makes the reflections more visible . Hope it helps.

Nice little tutorial about materials, ever think about making some in depth tutorials for realistic material creating? - Out of curiosity do you use bump mapping/Normal mapping on your floor when you use the specular method?

When creating that kind of floors, I only use a diffuse map and a specular map, that´s all. I only use bump maps when it appropiate, for materials that are in fact bumpy, such as floor tiles and the like. A typical parquet floor works very nicely without using bumps.