Hello guys,
I would like to hear from you guys how do you develop and prepare your Shaders and use them later as needed in different scenes and contexts. And if there is a set-up where I can create the materials and have confidence that they will work fine with different lights.
What I did for now is that I tried to make a simple scene with a Ball and and HDR with 1.0 intensity and I developed some materials but when I jumped to my scene where I have different lights I notice that my Materials don't work properly and they seem unrealistic and need to be tweaked again. So I just spent more time.
Thank you in advance.
Best way to develop materials that should be used later
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itsallgoode9
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I dabbled in doing this in the past, but for most of my projects, the timelines were too short to mess with worrying about if things are correctly calibrated for future use.
I would suggest, that the thing which is most important would be to make sure your exposure is correct before you start creating your material--and thereafter, calibrate any new scenes to this standard. This is affected by more than just light intensity--it is also affected by camera exposure setting. Theoretically, if you scanned a color card (or just made one in photoshop) and put it on a diffuse plane facing the camera, adjust your lighting until that i correctly exposed, then that would give you a baseline to work against. Create your material in that scene ALWAYS, then in any new scene, use the same color card to calibrate lighting against. if that's too time consuming, just use a known value in the scene to eyeball it--I tend to start with a fully sweep (just plain diffuse white material) and adjust exposure until the sweep is barely below white. That method is always close enough for my purposes.
Keep in mind that if you're using HDRI, pretty much every HDRI is going to be different in terms of EV ratio, so an exposure of 1 won't be the same brightness on multiple images.
Just treat it exactly like you would photography--that's how I describe rendering to clients and account managers I deal with when they aren't grasping what rendering is "ya know what, just pretend i'm a photographer and the final image i give you, is a photograph"
I would suggest, that the thing which is most important would be to make sure your exposure is correct before you start creating your material--and thereafter, calibrate any new scenes to this standard. This is affected by more than just light intensity--it is also affected by camera exposure setting. Theoretically, if you scanned a color card (or just made one in photoshop) and put it on a diffuse plane facing the camera, adjust your lighting until that i correctly exposed, then that would give you a baseline to work against. Create your material in that scene ALWAYS, then in any new scene, use the same color card to calibrate lighting against. if that's too time consuming, just use a known value in the scene to eyeball it--I tend to start with a fully sweep (just plain diffuse white material) and adjust exposure until the sweep is barely below white. That method is always close enough for my purposes.
Keep in mind that if you're using HDRI, pretty much every HDRI is going to be different in terms of EV ratio, so an exposure of 1 won't be the same brightness on multiple images.
Just treat it exactly like you would photography--that's how I describe rendering to clients and account managers I deal with when they aren't grasping what rendering is "ya know what, just pretend i'm a photographer and the final image i give you, is a photograph"
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simowlabrim
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- Joined: Sun Jun 10, 2018 9:17 am
Thank you so much, this will help a lot because it answers a lot of my questions and doubt
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itsallgoode9
- Posts: 894
- Joined: Thu Apr 03, 2014 9:04 am
- Location: New York City
- Contact:
one other tip, if time allows, is make sure to have a few different styles of lighting setups (if HDRI's make sure you've calibrated the HDRI to have the same exposure range) to swap between in your material scene to help check things like specularity, roughness and glancing angle reflections. The few times I took time to do something similar to what you are asking about, I had a sunny day HDRI, cloudy day HDRI and diffuse HDRI.
For example, if you're working with only an HDRI that is a sunny outdoor scene, you may notrealize that you have way too much specular on your material, or that your material is too rough--These might be errors that only show themselves in a scene which has much more even lighting with a lower dynamic range.
For example, if you're working with only an HDRI that is a sunny outdoor scene, you may notrealize that you have way too much specular on your material, or that your material is too rough--These might be errors that only show themselves in a scene which has much more even lighting with a lower dynamic range.