So, recently stumbled across various material tutorials ... like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVbIhe2eDxc with Grant Warwick explaining a complex metal material. The nice thing about this tutorial is, that it isn't just simplified reference, i.e. not just "we have a mix material node, lets mix two things". The simplified tutorials do not explain why you do what you do often. As a complete newbie in the hobby segment and non-commercial, I'm a bit confused by the large node trees and often don't exactly understand why things are done in the ways they were done. The great thing about the quoted tutorial from grant is that he starts off with a reference ... the truck and then shows why and how you recreate it, carefully explaining each node option selected and why. That's the only way I see to more or less quickly learn how to recreate reality (a thanks here to people like Grant to make some of these videos free to watch ... as hobbyist, I'm a bit limited in my budget and most products offer no "indy/hobbyist" prices and only differ between students and commercial professionals). While playing around myself with the various sliders is crucial to learning, it's not effective with the many possibilities at hand. It feels like learning Chinese by merely listening to people and guessing the alphabet and grammar on your own. You'll know what letters/icons are, what a word is... Thats how i know what some of the nodes do, having created simple materials with Textures etc, but beyond that it's a big question mark
Why multiply instead of mixing textures? What does it really do? How to properly use falloff? Whats fresnel? Heard things watched videos but where does it apply in Octane? Where's the learning book for Octane like the one for Chinese? I tried to watch the videos of the Vray renderer, but I'm having a really hard time applying it to octane. Some of the general ideas are clear, but since many node sliders have similar effects (specularity or roughness changing the way reflections look etc) its soemtimes difficult to realize which property I should play with to get what nature does. So I wonder, are any very experienced 3D people like Grant going to create Octane tutorials of the same quality at some point? The most important point is the goal oriented approach, i. e. here is a real apple, why does it look how it looks, what are the physics at work, how and why do we represent that in Octane.
