OTOY Forums

Karba wrote:I don't really understand you, guys.
It takes about 30-60 secs to make average material from scratch. Why do you try to make hundreds of materials for any case?

Would be great if someone with the skills/flair for this could create a few simple 'creative' workflows showing how easy this is?

When its time for me to render its kinda difficult 'process' workflow for me - nothing creative in it; just recall things that worked previously, apply them... the idea of thinking of a material, then drumming up a material in 30-60 seconds sounds so far from reality as to be 'Magic'

in the meantime I'm still definitely stuck in the 'make a library of things that work and apply as required' camp

For me, advanced materials are always confusing. I have all these tools .. I end up with normal maps, specular maps ... then I have the glistening from specular on my final material and I wonder: Is this right? Have I done soemthing wrong? How do I know without a real comparison next to me of the same material? Have I inverted some values? Is it actually reflecting wrongly, but I'm not realizing it?

And so on .... sure we can all create a texture node and other easy stuff, but we never really know what we did .. it just "somehow" works. Which is why I like pro-material to look at ... or just use from a library.

For my own, I never use the live DB. Premade materials almost always require tweakings to match my needs, and most often the scale of textures is not convenient, or the projection mode. Also, the textures inside can't be edited...

Materials from the live DB can be useful when starting with Octane, to learn their nodes stucture, but not much for production.

Making my own materials and texture is faster, easier and gives the exact result I have in mind, and I have a total control on textures of any layer that I can edit at will.

But is the ORBx thing not just a hack? It would be much nicer if there was a real "LocalDB" with gallery mode and all proper search and categorize tools. I'm not a fan of hacks using metadata files and such. But maybe that exists .. just havent found it, yet?