Creating realistic materials?

[RealityFox]

I've seen all of these amazing renders but I have never seen any sort of advanced material tutorial or guide for Octane, where do people learn this sort of stuff? I can understand that they learned it from one program and simply just migrated their knowledge to Octane but I sadly don't have an in depth skill of other rendering programs. The only other one I really know how to use is Cycles (although my knowledge of cycles isn't really that amazing). For example I want to make a nice skin shader but I have no idea where to go to learn it for Octane. I know how to make a SSS shader but I don't know how to push it to make realistic skin. This also happened to me when I tried making a nice car paint shader but when compared to the Live DB it didn't seem as good. I used the falloff node and such in order to create mine but it still didn't seem that great.

Long story short is there any good tutorials out there that I can read that will allow me to apply the knowledge to Octane?

[gordonrobb]

Ditto. Would really love some pointers.

[FrankPooleFloating]

Gentlemen, until you get the info/tutorials etc that you desire, you can download materials from Live DB, double-click them (which takes you inside the materials node trees) and reverse engineer them - to more quickly learn how stuff works. This is better than it sounds... And can really give you quick insight how the fancy-shmancy materials are made.

[gordonrobb]

You're right - however. The issue with replicating some of the LiveDB materials, which I've posted about else-where, is that some of them rely on image maps, but there is now way of even seeing what these maps are, let alone accessing them for converting to (for example) Octane for Lightwave. I assume that people who share their materials on LiveDB, wouldn't have an issue with this conversion, but there isn't a way to do it - that I have found.

[FrankPooleFloating]

Crap.. I forgot about that part... but if you click the little eyeball at the far right (for images),
you are treated to a pretty decent size thumb.. which at least does not leave you clueless as
to what kind of image was used.

[RealityFox]

The issue with Live DB (although I agree that their are a few that I can learn from) is that their are a few where I don't see any options for them. Such as the car shaders. It's like they're stuck on the colours they have. This includes the skin shader.

- I still have one question though: Where did people obtain the knowledge to use Octane the way they do without any advanced tutorials for it? Is there nothing out there to teach me rendering that could be applied to Octane? I've been waiting for advanced tutorials for a while now sadly....

[gordonrobb]

you know that if you double click on the material, it often opens up the node tree for that material yes? That's normally where you get all the details for it.

[RealityFox]

Actually after I made that post I realized the material from live DB is on the model when you click it with the material picker I always thought it would be on the material node XD - I'm silly. But I still wish for advanced tutorials.

[FrankPooleFloating]

You can drag them right into nodegraph area too.. Then double-click them. Not 100% sure it even mentions this in manual...

[kavorka]

another thing you can do.
If the material has a texture embedded into it, as in you don't see it in the graph editor. Right click on the attribute that has the texture, click copy, and paste in the node graph. Then connect it where it need to go. This will allow you better control, like if you want to use it as a mix amount, or apply another node it it, ect.

if you grab the brushed steel-LZ mat, you will see what I mean.